Centre for Advanced Sensor Technologies, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Bath, BA2 7AY, Bath, UK.
Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos", Patriarchou Gregoriou and 27 Neapoleos Str., 153 41 Aghia Paraskevi, Attiki, Greece.
Lab Chip. 2017 Apr 11;17(8):1388-1405. doi: 10.1039/c7lc00121e.
Commercialization of lab-on-a-chip devices is currently the "holy grail" within the μTAS research community. While a wide variety of highly sophisticated chips which could potentially revolutionize healthcare, biology, chemistry and all related disciplines are increasingly being demonstrated, very few chips are or can be adopted by the market and reach the end-users. The major inhibition factor lies in the lack of an established commercial manufacturing technology. The lab-on-printed circuit board (lab-on-PCB) approach, while suggested many years ago, only recently has re-emerged as a very strong candidate, owing to its inherent upscaling potential: the PCB industry is well established all around the world, with standardized fabrication facilities and processes, but commercially exploited currently only for electronics. Owing to these characteristics, complex μTASs integrating microfluidics, sensors, and electronics on the same PCB platform can easily be upscaled, provided more processes and prototypes adapted to the PCB industry are proposed. In this article, we will be reviewing for the first time the PCB-based prototypes presented in the literature to date, highlighting the upscaling potential of this technology. The authors believe that further evolution of this technology has the potential to become a much sought-after standardized industrial fabrication technology for low-cost μTASs, which could in turn trigger the projected exponential market growth of μTASs, in a fashion analogous to the revolution of Si microchips via the CMOS industry establishment.
商业化的芯片实验室设备目前是 μTAS 研究界的“圣杯”。虽然越来越多的高度复杂的芯片正在被展示，这些芯片有可能彻底改变医疗保健、生物学、化学和所有相关学科，但很少有芯片能够被市场采用并到达最终用户手中。主要的抑制因素在于缺乏成熟的商业制造技术。印刷电路板上的芯片实验室（lab-on-PCB）方法虽然多年前就已经提出，但由于其固有的规模化潜力，最近才重新成为一个非常有力的候选方案：PCB 行业在全球范围内已经建立起来，拥有标准化的制造设施和工艺，但目前仅用于电子产品。由于这些特点，复杂的 μTAS 可以很容易地在同一个 PCB 平台上集成微流控、传感器和电子设备，只要提出更多适应 PCB 行业的工艺和原型。在本文中，我们将首次回顾迄今为止文献中提出的基于 PCB 的原型，强调该技术的规模化潜力。作者认为，这项技术的进一步发展有可能成为一种备受追捧的低成本 μTAS 标准化工业制造技术，这反过来又有可能引发 μTAS 市场的预期指数级增长，就像 CMOS 行业的建立引发了硅微芯片的革命一样。
