Low-cost Fabrication of PDMS Microfluidic Chamber using Digital Cutter Machine

Abstract

Microfluidic chamber or channel is one important tool in the lab-on-a-chip (LoC) technology, which usually serves as a platform to contain liquid analytes. The conventional method to fabricate microfluidic chamber is based on photolithography technique. However, it is a high-cost process and requires special equipment, such as mask aligners and expensive photosensitive resist material. In this work, we fabricated the microfluidic chamber and channel using a much simpler and lower-cost technique that is using PDMS as the main material and polyimide tape as the mold. Using this method, the diameter of the microfluidic pattern (channel/chamber) could be made up to as small as 1 mm and the height of the flow channel was down to tens or hundreds of μm scale-depending on the thickness of the tape. The flow test results showed that low cost and simple microfluidic fabrication method had a good performance and could potentially be further used for real analyte flow test.