Study on the Manufacture of Microfluidic Chip with Coated Glass

Abstract

In this paper, a simple and facile technique for manufacturing glass-based microfluidic chips was developed. Instead of using expensive dry etching technology, the standard UV lithography and wet chemical etching technique was used to fabricate microchannels on a K9 glass substrate. The fabrication process of microfluidic chip including vacuum evaporation, annealing, lithography, and BHF (HF-NH4F-H2O) wet etching were investigated. Through series experiments, we found that anneal was the critical factor for chip quality. As a representative example, a microfluidic channel with 20 m of depth, and 80 m of width was successfully prepared, and the channel surfaces are quite smooth. These results present a simple, low cost, flexible and easy way to fabricate glass-based microfluidic chips.