The Development History of Microfluidic Chips

Inquiry

Introduction to Integrated Circuit and Photolithography

Microfluidic chip has proven its significant role in many life science fields, especially for biomedical and chemical studies. Moreover, a wide battery of classical technologies, such as photolithography and integrated circuit technology can facilitate the development of microfluidics by borrowing their principles and biomaterials before microfluidics became its unique science. For example, the integrated circuit is an assembly of an electronic chip that consists of two main parts, active units and passive units connected by a thin substrate of semiconductor material, like silicon. Till now, a variety of integrated circuits have been used for the production of microfluidic chips to analyze different liquid samples. Also, photolithography has been designed for producing silicon semiconductor patterns by using oxide layers on both integrated circuits fabrication and microfluidic chip development. As a result, the rise of these techniques has laid the foundation for microfluidic development.

Fig. 1 Generations of fabrication techniques of microfluidic devices.¹

The History of Microfluidic Chips Development

The history of microfluidic chip development can date back to the 1960s, principally in microfluidic fabrication. In the past few years, a wide range of soft-lithography technologies like microcontact printing (µCT) and replica molding (REM), have been established for patterning small structures in the field of microfluidic chips development. Meanwhile, a series of materials, including silicon, glass, and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), have been used for microchips rapid prototyping. Typically, PDMS has been regarded as the most popular material in microelectronics due to its ease of culture and high cell compatibility.

Based on these researches, several precisely controlled microfluidic systems have been generated for reducing the volume of the fluid minimize the fluid handling unit. Over time, many attempts have been made by researchers to produce novel microfluidic components for fluid delivery, fluid mixing, valve control, or the separation and concentration of micro-molecules.

The Main Timeline of Microfluidic Chips Development

In the 1970s, a miniaturized gas chromatograph analyzer based on silicon wafers was developed.
In the 1980s, new microvalves and micropumps were designed by using silicon micromachining technology.
In the 1990s, several silicon-based microfluidic analysis systems were presented.
In the 1990s, PDMS was introduced as a material for microfluidic chip development.
In the 2000s, soft lithography in PDMS was studied as a new method for manufacturing and testing prototype devices.
In the 2006s, a novel microfluidics pressure pump for handling fluids was designed.

Currently, microfluidic chip technologies, including but not limited to, lab-on-a-chip technology, three-dimensional (3D) cell culture, organs-on-chips as well as droplet techniques, have all been developed for different kinds of microfluidic chips for various disease treatments. To meet the challenging requirements, Creative Biolabs has built a team of experienced scientists with facilities and processes designed specifically to provide the best strategy and protocols customized to suit any microfluidic chip discovery project.

Reference

Niculescu, Chircov, et al. " Fabrication and Applications of Microfluidic Devices: A Review." International Journal of Molecular Sciences 22.4 (2021): 2011.

For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.