Isotropic etching technique for three-dimensional microball-bearing raceways

A multi-step plasma etching technique is developed to obtain deep-grooved micro-scale ball-bearing raceways and employed in the fabrication of multiple ball-bearing supported microturbines. Deep-groove geometry has been chosen for the microball-bearing systems because of the ability to handle mixed axial and radial loads, allowing for stable, high-speed operation compared to previous iterations of the microball-bearing raceways. The multi-step inductively coupled plasma-based process is optimized to obtain <2% deviation amongst intended raceway depth, width and curvature. Etching non-uniformity is measured to be 0.15% within the raceway of a single device. The bearing dynamics with the new deep-groove geometry have been simulated. The deep-groove raceway packed with off-the-shelf precision ball-bearings provided a stability improvement over previous demonstrations of high-performance rotary micromachines operating at high speeds. (Some figures may appear in colour only in the online journal)