Technology maturity assessment of micro and nano manufacturing processes and process chains

Abstract

There is a trend to design processes and process chains to satisfy the specific functional and technical requirements of emerging miniaturized multi-material products. This underlying trend in turn prompts the need to find a means of assessing the “maturity” of the “component” technologies in realizing these processes and process chains. In this context, the paper presents research carried out as part of national and FP7 research and infrastructure programmes to develop and validate a systematic approach for technology maturity assessment in the domain of micro and nano manufacturing (MNM). The proposed methodology is a new instrument based on modelling the capability of the individual processes and technology interfaces between processes. It is inspired by a capability maturity model which has been applied successfully in the software engineering domain. The proposed instrument can be used to assess the maturity levels of individual processes and the combined maturity of pairs or chains of processes. To demonstrate its validity, it was applied for assessing the maturity of a set of MNM process pairs. The results from this pilot application are discussed and conclusions made about the applicability of the proposed methodology.