COTECH – COnverging TECHnologies
To shorten time to market and to reduce costs, the vision of modular desktop or micro factories evolved. The micro factory of the future has to enable the further concentration and combination of complementary techniques (e.g. micro injection moulding and hot embossing, micro injection moulding and localized coating) as well as to significantly improve replication accuracy and possibilities, to realise automated assembly steps and to include highly sophisticated quality control techniques in all steps of the process chain. To prepare the future micro factory for the polymer processing industry COTECH aims at concentrating and combining complementary techniques by converging technologies and developing hybrid solutions in the full process chain of micro production.
MIDEMMA – Minimizing Defects in Micro-manufacturing Applications
Micro-manufacturing requires ‘Zero-Defect’ oriented approaches, both in large- scale and in short-run production. Current quality control approaches, coming from macro-manufacturing, are mainly based on post-process geometric control, which produces a large time lag between the defect generation and its detection, usually leading to large amount of defect parts (large- scale) or wasted high value processing (short- run). Moreover, this approach does not immediately point the highlight error sources to help with error correction, and other criteria, such as material integrity, physical properties, surface topography and piece or component functionality, are not typically taken into account typically. The MIDEMMA project will give a global solution for the ‘zero defect’ approach in micro-manufacturing, with a focus on the aspects that are specific to micro-manufacturing and that have an impact in the competitiveness of the European micro-manufacturers.
New production technologies of complex 3D micro-devices through multi-process integration of ultra-precision engineering techniques
The Integ-Micro is a research project funded under the 7th Framework Program of the EU coordinated by Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna – CRIM .The four-year project was launched in Oct. 2008 with the objective of developing new high precision micro-manufacturing technologies. The beneficiary sectors of these radical innovations in micro-machining technologies will cover a wide range of industries such as medical, bio-medical, automotive, environmental monitoring, aerospace, watch manufacturing and others. The project involves 20 partners from different countries, Italy, UK, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland including universities, research institutes, companies and industry associations.