Polymer micro molding with bulk metallic glass mold

Micro molding of polymers is one of the main methods for large mass non-electronic micro devices, in which the micro mold fabrication is very critical. Metallic glass can be thermoplastic forming without any internal stress and shrinkage defects when it is in the supercooled liquid region and it will behave as a sticky meta-stable liquid at the temperature. This paper is to execute superplastic forming to fabricate micro mold using the metallic glass Pd₄₀Cu₃₀Ni₁₀P₂₀ in the supercooled liquid region instead of the lithography, electroplating, and molding (LIGA) processing about electroforming technology. Experimental results verify the feasibility of this method, and successfully duplicate the microstructure to the polymers. Furthermore, the metallic glass mold with varies features has higher strength and longer life than silicon mold. This method provides a new fabrication approach for large quantities of replication of micro-fluidic chip and micro-optics device.