Techniques for combining active devices with microengineered silicon devices

Merging silicon microengineering and integrated circuit processes introduces a number of problems which need to be addressed. Firstly, micromachined features make subsequent processing difficult. Secondly, the etchants and etch processes used in silicon microengineering are often incompatible with circuit processing. Thirdly, the thermal requirements of each of the separate processes have to be adapted so that the integrity of each process is not compromised