Micro-handling of parts in presence of adhesive forces

Micro-systems are generally made of silicon; however, to fulfill all their potential applications, a lot of MEMS require also structures of different materials and therefore an hybrid production approach. Hybrid systems are made up by several components; each of them is realised using the most appropriate technologies and materials. These components have to be connected together by assembly operations. At micro-scale, however, assembly is a critical operation, and classic assembly techniques cannot generally be applied. One of the main difficulties is due to the adhesive phenomena. In this paper, a brief overview of adhesive forces is presented, providing the theoretic background, and a new handling principle, that takes advantage of capillary force, is proposed.