This article is the second in a four-part series of articles providing an overview of the challenges and opportunities in microscale additive manufacturing (AM) processes with applications in fabrication of high precision micro/nano-products. Laser-based microscale additive manufacturing processes are discussed this article. Compared to the other AM processes, laser-based processes provide several unique advantages, especially in terms of a wide variety of processable materials and high volumetric throughputs. The processes discussed in this paper can fabricate complex microscale features with minimum resolutions ranging from hundreds of nanometers to hundreds of microns. However, there are several fundamental limits and trade-offs which hinder the scalability of these processes. The paper discusses the limits to the materials, resolution, geometry, and volumetric throughput and proposes approaches to mitigate these limits and improve the scalability of laser-based microscale AM processes.

本文是由四部分组成的系列文章中的第二篇，该系列文章概述了微型增材制造（AM）工艺及其在高精度微/纳米产品制造中的应用的挑战和机遇。本文讨论了基于激光的微型增材制造工艺。与其他AM工艺相比，基于激光的工艺具有多个独特优势，特别是在多种可加工材料和高体积通量方面。本文讨论的过程可以制造复杂的微尺度特征，其最小分辨率范围从数百纳米到数百微米。但是，存在一些基本限制和折衷因素，这些因素限制了这些过程的可伸缩性。本文讨论了材料，分辨率，