Parametric study of injection molding and hot embossing in polymer microfabrication

In recent years, plastics have begun to show great commercial potential especially in manufacturing micro-structured parts. Injection molding and hot embossing are two major microfabrication methods. Replication accuracy was investigated for these two methods. Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) was used as the polymer substrate. The mold insert (or master) was fabricated by LIGA-type method. In this study, hot embossing was found to have better replication accuracy for microstructure than injection molding. Experiments were also conducted to study the effects of process parameters on the replication quality.