A photosensitive polyimide based method for an easy fabrication of multichannel neural electrodes.

To develop practical and inexpensive multichannel neural electrodes, we designed and fabricated photosensitive polyimide based flexible multichannel neural electrodes using MEMS technologies. Compared to a conventional micromachining with non-photosensitive materials, the advantage of applying photosensitive polyimide is the elimination of the dry etching, which involves the complex multilevel processes for controlling the etching conditions to define the outline of the neural electrodes and expose the microelectrodes. Thus, photosensitive polyimide allows more options in optimization of the configuration and size of neural electrodes depending on experimental purposes, and enables fabrication at a lower cost with improvement of process yields.