Metallische Konstruktionswerkstoffe in der Mikrosystemtechnik bei strukturierter elektrochemischer Herstellung

The present paper deals with metallic design materials for the realization of microsystems. The main object of our studies is systematically tracking the technological process for patterned electrochemical metal precipitation. This includes the basic conditions of the technology used, identifying and regulating the quantities having an influence on electrochemical precipitation and determining the material parameters of the metals with respect to their usage.The potential of application of patterned electrochemical metal precipitation is especially noticeable with actuators that are electromagnetically operated. As an example of a such a system, a new type of contact system was demonstrated in the framework of the BMBF-project MikroRel. Beside of nickel for functional layers, there were furthermore electroplated materials involved like gold/nickel, gold/cobalt, nickel/palladium or silver as contact coating and copper as sacrificial layer. Intensive static and dynamic studies on the contacts yielded contact resistance values lower than 20 mOhm; at contact forces less than 10mN, high switching currents up to 1.5A at 12V and switching cycles of 700µs. Thereby, a high degree of precision in the switching cycles can be stated, as contact bouncing could not be observed.