Investigation of the maskless lithography technique for the rapid and cost-effective prototyping of microfluidic devices in laboratories

Abstract

This paper describes maskless lithography as a rapid and cost-effective technique for fabricating high-quality microfluidic devices in laboratories. The detailed effects of exposure parameters on microstructure features are explored. A quantitative analysis of these effects provides insights into the device design and the selection of optimum processing parameters. To overcome the limitation of small exposure area, subregion stitching and sequential exposure are adopted for fabricating larger patterns. Seamless stitching between adjacent exposure subregions is achieved by optimizing the grayscale values of the stitching side/corner. These data are also valuable for exploring grayscale and multi-step lithography. Various hydrodynamic microdevices are then fabricated and characterized to validate the optimized parameters.