Mukherjee Prithviraj, Nebuloni Federico, Gao Hua, Zhou Jian, Papautsky Ian
Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA.
Department of Electronics, Informatics and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy.
Micromachines (Basel). 2019 Mar 15;10(3):192. doi: 10.3390/mi10030192.
Fabrication of microfluidic devices by soft lithography is by far the most popular approach due to simplicity and low cost. In this approach PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) is cast on a photoresist master to generate replicas that are then sealed against glass slides using oxygen plasma. In this work, we demonstrated fabrication of soft photolithography masters using lamination of ADEX dry film as an alternative to the now classic SU-8 resist masters formed by spin coating. Advantages of using ADEX dry film include the easily-achievable uniform thickness without edge bead; simplicity of the process with significant time savings due to non-sticky nature of the film; and fewer health concerns due to less toxic developing solution and antimony-free composition. As we demonstrate, the process can be performed in a low-cost improvised fabrication room in ambient light, in place of a conventional yellow-light cleanroom environment. We believe this approach holds the promise of delivering state-of-the-art microfluidic techniques to the broad field of biomedical and pharmaceutical research.
通过软光刻制造微流控设备是目前最流行的方法，因为其简单且成本低。在这种方法中，聚二甲基硅氧烷（PDMS）被浇铸在光刻胶母版上以生成复制品，然后使用氧等离子体将其与载玻片密封。在这项工作中，我们展示了使用ADEX干膜层压来制造软光刻母版，作为通过旋涂形成的经典SU-8光刻胶母版的替代方法。使用ADEX干膜的优点包括易于实现均匀厚度且无边缘珠；由于膜的不粘性，工艺简单且可大幅节省时间；以及由于显影液毒性较小且无锑成分，对健康的影响较小。正如我们所展示的，该过程可以在低成本的简易制造室中在环境光下进行，而无需传统的黄光洁净室环境。我们相信这种方法有望为生物医学和制药研究的广泛领域提供最先进的微流控技术。
