Design and fabrication of a new two-dimensional pneumatic micro-conveyor

This paper presents the design, fabrication and testing of a new two-dimensional pneumatic conveyor for micro-chips manipulation. The conveyor can levitate and move flat objects to a desired position using controlled air-flow. The structure consists of a sandwich of silicon–silicon–Pyrex layers fabricated using MEMS technologies, in which deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) and ultrasonic micro-machining techniques were used for the fabrication of silicon and Pyrex chips, respectively. The silicon–silicon wafers and silicon–Pyrex wafers were bonded by gold eutectic bonding and anodic bonding techniques, respectively. The device array is about 9 mm × 9 mm of surface dimension and composed of 8 × 8 pneumatic micro-conveyors. A micro-conveyor has four nozzles that can generate inclined air-jets allowing four conveyance directions. We demonstrate experimentally that a 3 mm diameter object of 2 mg weight can be conveyed to a desired position with intermittent air-flow of 20 kPa.