Capillary Self-Alignment of Mesoscopic Foil Components for Sensor-Systems-in-Foil

This paper reports on the effective use of capillary self-alignment for low-cost and time-efficient assembly of heterogeneous foil components into a smart electronic identification label. Particularly, we demonstrate the accurate (better than 50 μm) alignment of cm-sized functional foil dies. We investigated the role played by the assembly liquid, by the size and the weight of assembling dies and by their initial offsets in the self-alignment performance. It was shown that there is a definite range of initial offsets allowing dies to align with high accuracy and within approximately the same time window, irrespective of their initial offset.