Objective of the project:

Reduce manufacturing costs of micro products.

The aim of the project will be to reducing the cost of mass production of diagnosis and therapeutic micro devices, which for the moment are produced often as personalized devices and can often only be manufactured in small batches.

This kind of medical microdevices lack nowadays of specific manufacturing techniques for production of medium sized batches, and depend from conventional miniaturization methods inherited from silicon processing technologies, developed for the microelectronics industry. Such methods are based on expensive masters and masks, and are only economic for high volume production.

Methodology:

In this project flexible and cost-effective tools and tool inserts will be used which will be machined using different advanced techniques like among others laser structuring, laser cladding, micromachining, micro-edm, focused ion-beam milling and application of DLC coatings.

Low cost replication techniques like embossing, injection moulding, gel casting and advanced VPP (Viscous Plastic Processing) will be used to allow microfabrication at low cost per unit.

Non destructive inspective systems like optical coherence tomography (OCT) using fiber optical sensors and laser ultrasound will be further developed in order to allow inspection and quality control of the production processes, of the produced devices and products.

Planning:

Dit project is currently running.

The Fabimed project started in September 2013 and the project duration is 3 years.

Link to the website:

http://www.fabimed.eu/