Micromanufacturing processes are expanding in their length and breadth as long as the related research and development (R&D) activities and applications are concerned. Products are getting miniaturized and their performance efficiency is getting enhanced by the addition of micro/nanofeatures and devices. In the set of these two articles (Part I and Part II), an attempt has been made to review the latest R&D activities of the selected micromanufacturing processes. This article (Part I) deals with a review of the literature related to attrition (subtractive, or machining and finishing) processes (both types—traditional and advanced) including microturning, micromilling, microdrilling, abrasive jet micromachining, laser beam micromachining, electrochemical micromachining, magnetorheological finishing, abrasive flow finishing, magnetic abrasive finishing, ion beam micromachining and so on. Apart from the subtractive processes, an overview of the X-ray lithography has also been presented. An attempt has been made to report some applications to help the readers to evolve more new applications of these processes. At the end of different sections/subsections, some research areas have been identified, which would hopefully fill the gaps between the theoretical analysis, experimental work and applications.

Magnetic abrasive finishing (MAF) uses magnetic force of very low magnitude applied on ferromagnetic abrasive particles to obtain very high level surface finish. The process has been investigated extensively in the finishing of cylindrical surfaces. This paper reports an experimental work on the analysis of surface roughness and material removal using response surface method in the MAF of plane surfaces. The surface finish was found to improve significantly with an increase in the grain size, relative size of abrasive particles vis-a-vis the iron particles, feed rate and current. The optimum parameter levels which gave better surface finish and the higher material removal were also obtained from this experimentation