It is hard to deny that our society evolves towards an information society. As a matter of fact, today every citizen, at least in the developed countries, is in position to receive, store, process and transmit a huge quantity of information, much more than even few years ago, and this quantity of information will steadily increase in the next years.

Microtechnology has been one of the driving forces pushing this trend, since each progress in information storage, processing and sharing is accompanied by a progress in reduction of the geometrical features of the used devices. Besides this, demand for increasing the performance and for reducing the costs have been main factors in this trend.

This application area today also constitutes the largest micromanufacturing technologies market dominated principally by two products, namely, the hard disk drive heads (HDD) and ink-jet print heads. Other important applications involve magneto-optical heads, projection displays, electronic papers, gyroscopes, optical switches, attenuators, gain equalizers, micro-relays, RF components, etc. [10] (see Fig. 2.13).

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