An Alternative Solution for Microfluidic Chip Fabrication

This paper focuses on microfluidic devices, widely used in bioengineering. Their fabrication for research is almost entirely made of PDMS (a silicone), using photolithography and replica molding technologies, which involve many processing steps, sealed with a glass layer by plasma bonding. Our solution fabricates devices in just two steps, laser ablation of a glass layer, technology already extensively tested, and sealing with a commercial silicone layer by plasma bonding, drastically reducing skilled human operations and lead time. The paper describes the technologies with PDMS and with our solution, the design of a microfluidic test chip, the laser ablation and assessment by a confocal microscope of the microfluidic circuit in the glass layer of the chip, the plasma bonding of glass layers with PDMS and two other commercial silicones utilizing a grid of different plasma parameters, the qualitative assessment of the plasma bonding and choosing of a silicone as PDMS substitute, the extensive test on the bonding quality by two different pressure circuits on a batch of microfluidic chips realized with our proposed technology.