Today’s challenges

The impact of the integration of micro- and nano- technologies to plastic component
manufacturing by injection moulding has already been shown in some restricted areas
such as the recording media industry (CD, DVD and Blue Ray) and more recently the anticounterfeiting holograms. Currently, technologies providing functionality and intelligence to plastic parts thanks to surface micro/nano-texturation only exist for very specific approaches. Consequently, the plastic industry lacks a generic way of developing new products and bringing them onto the market. Additionally, long duration of the development cycles, high costs and high risks, very often prevent the industry to “move to micro/nano”.