Abstract

This book contains the proceedings of 3 symposia dealing with various aspects of small scale structures. Symposium A deals with the development of new materials, including ceramics, polymers, metals, etc., their microstructuring as well as their potential for application in microsystems. All kinds of microsystems are considered, e.g. mechanical, magnetic, optical, chemical, biochemical and issues related to assembly and packaging were also covered.

Symposium B deals with four topics: synthesis and preparation of nanostructured ceramics and composites with well-controlled geometric order and chemical composition; coupling of these structures to transducers for current and future chemical and biochemical devices based upon microoptics, microelectronics, microionics, microelectrodes or molecular cages; planar thin film structures and the control of covalent thin film/transducer couplings, the control of selective, stable and sensitive recognition centers at the surface, at grain boundaries or in the bulk of selected nanostructured materials with extremely narrow particle size distributions; analysis of these structures and sensor functions by means of techniques utilizing photons, electrons, ions, or atomic particle beam probes.

Symposium E examines the structure-property relationships in thin films and multilayers, from the point of view of both fundamental studies and practical applications.