Laser micro fabrication: Material removing or adding

Currently there are many laser micro fabrication technologies. The technologies are based on the philosophy of either subtractive material from top to down or additive material by bottom up. Laser ablation for instant removes material gradually to produce microstructure. Most common used lasers are ultrafast or UV laser. CO2 or YAG laser also can be found to apply in micro fabrication. Another approach such as micro stereo lithography(uSLA) and selective laser sintering(SLS) adds the materials from bottom to top layer by layer. In this paper the authors introduced a novel technology Laser Vaporizing Sintering(LVS) which combines material removing and adding together: This technology removes the powder material with laser vaporizing and meanwhile sinters the powder material to form micro structure by laser. Several powder particles can be sintered to form a thin wall. It shows great potential advantages to fabricate micro parts.