Developing Microfabrication Capabilities Across The Americas: A Case Study

This paper describes collaborative work between Chilean and American universities to develop microfabrication capabilities to educate Chilean students in design, development and fabrication of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS). Microfabrication facilities are extremely rare in Latin American universities, and students there have virtually no exposure to this key technology. To our knowledge, the facility documented in this paper is the first microfabrication facility to be developed for university education in Chile and only the second in Latin America. Challenges included the extremely small budget available for the project and the paucity of educational and resource materials available in Latin America.