Abstract
Wafer-scale fabrication of complex nanofluidic systems with integrated electronics is essential to realizing ubiquitous, compact, reliable, high-sensitivity and low-cost biomolecular sensors. Here we report a scalable fabrication strategy capable of producing nanofluidic chips with complex designs and down to single-digit nanometre dimensions over 200 mm wafer scale. Compatible with semiconductor industry standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor logic circuit fabrication processes, this strategy extracts a patterned sacrificial silicon layer through hundreds of millions of nanoscale vent holes on each chip by gas-phase Xenon difluoride etching. Using single-molecule fluorescence imaging, we demonstrate these sacrificial nanofluidic chips can function to controllably and completely stretch lambda DNA in a two-dimensional nanofluidic network comprising channels and pillars. The flexible nanofluidic structure design, wafer-scale fabrication, single-digit nanometre channels, reliable fluidic sealing and low thermal budget make our strategy a potentially universal approach to integrating functional planar nanofluidic systems with logic circuits for lab-on-a-chip applications.
Highlights
Wafer-scale fabrication of complex nanofluidic systems with integrated electronics is essential to realizing ubiquitous, compact, reliable, high-sensitivity and low-cost biomolecular sensors
Our integration strategy was first disseminated in a conference abstract[29], but this paper provides for the first time detailed and complete discussions on the integration strategy, key challenging issues, fabrication results, single-digit nanometre channels, and single-molecule deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) straddling
The nanofluidic chips are compatible with high-resolution fluorescence imaging[7], by employing relatively long microfluidic structures (30 mm) that leave ample space for a microscope objective
Summary
Wafer-scale fabrication of complex nanofluidic systems with integrated electronics is essential to realizing ubiquitous, compact, reliable, high-sensitivity and low-cost biomolecular sensors. The flexible nanofluidic structure design, wafer-scale fabrication, single-digit nanometre channels, reliable fluidic sealing and low thermal budget make our strategy a potentially universal approach to integrating functional planar nanofluidic systems with logic circuits for lab-on-a-chip applications. Advanced nanofluidic systems[1,2], for example, nanochannels[3,4] and nanopores[5,6], have enabled manipulation of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) biopolymers with unprecedented control by exploiting the complex fluidic dynamic interactions with nanostructures, such as nanoconfinement induced stretching[3,4], collision induced straddling and stretching[7], and lateral displacement induced separation[8] These systems have demonstrated effective sorting[4,8,9,10], sensing[5,6,11,12,13,14] and analysis[15,16] at low sample concentration and even single-molecule level. Our integration strategy was first disseminated in a conference abstract[29], but this paper provides for the first time detailed and complete discussions on the integration strategy, key challenging issues, fabrication results, single-digit nanometre channels, and single-molecule DNA straddling
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