Micro powder injection molding technology is quite similar to traditional MIM technology since it is developed from MIM. They both have four major steps of fabrication, preparing feedstock (even mixture of raw material powder and binder), injection molding (to fill liquid feedstock into molds, in order to get preformed bases), debinding (to remove binder from green bodies, in order to get debinded bases) and sintering (to conduct thermal treatment to debinded bases, to make them have certain density and mechanical property). Therefore, it carries three advantages out from traditional MIM, which are low cost, complex structure and high-performance. Nevertheless, requirements are higher for raw material, molding device, injection molding and thermal treatment techniques when micro structural size drops to micron level. That is an important distinguish between micro powder injection molding and traditional metal injection molding, and is also the purpose of micro powder injection molding research.
