Preparation of microstructure bodies in freestanding diamond-like carbon foil prepared using plasma-based ion implantation

We prepared a thick, freestanding, diamond-like carbon (DLC) foil and fabricated microstructure bodies in the DLC foil using plasma-based ion implantation (PBII) and mold duplicating and sacrifice-mold etching processes. During PBII, an accelerating high-voltage (HV) pulse was superposed onto the RF power. It was desirable for this DLC foil to have a small residual internal stress (σr) in order to fabricate a freestanding foil, and a substrate temperature (Tsub) during the deposition that was not so high relative to room temperature. We obtained the DLC foil which had approximately 0.15 GPa of the σr and which was prepared below 100 °C. We demonstrated two types of microstructure bodies in the freestanding DLC foil, which were freestanding needle arrays with solid needles, specifically a “nozzle-like” needle array. They are the first case of using DLC prepared by a PBII. Such needle arrays can be used in the near future in micro fluidic devices such as painless needles in micro healthcare chip devices and in ink-jet printer heads. The results show that the DLC foil developed in this study can be used in various micro electromechanical systems.