Mehboudi Aryan, Singhal Shrawan, Sreenivasan S V
NASCENT Engineering Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78758, USA.
Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
Lab Chip. 2025 Mar 11;25(6):1521-1536. doi: 10.1039/d4lc00838c.
Despite being a high-resolution separation technique, deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) technology is facing multiple challenges with regard to design, manufacture, and operation of pertinent devices. This work specifically aims at alleviating difficulties associated with design and manufacture of DLD chips. The process of design and production of computer-aided design (CAD) mask layout files that are typically required for computational modeling analysis, optimization, as well as for manufacturing DLD-based micro/nanofluidic chips is complex, time-consuming, and often necessitates a high level of expertise in the field. Herein, we report a universal framework to automate the process of designing DLD and producing layout CAD files for various systems spanning from simply a single DLD unit to complex parallelized DLD structures with/without additional upstream/downstream components, , inlet filter, preload, collection channels, and through-wafer vias. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time, we adopt imprint lithography (IL) into fabrication process flow to define fine features of parallelized DLD arrays, while avoiding problems in connection with accessibility and cost of advanced photolithography tools. With regard to parallelized DLD architectures, we also report a new fabrication process flow aiming at mitigating the problems related to creating through-silicon vias at high yield. We demonstrate some use cases of our developed design and manufacture framework by designing and fabricating multiple devices to separate microspheres (0.6 μm and 1.3 μm) from aqueous media. We believe that our design automation package offers a user-friendly workflow, significantly alleviating the hurdles associated with design and optimization of DLD structures, while our fabrication process flow can provide an accessible solution to manufacturing micron- and submicron-scale DLD chips. These innovations should enable a larger community to adopt the DLD technology into their research, particularly for lab-on-a-chip applications.
尽管确定性侧向位移（DLD）技术是一种高分辨率分离技术，但在相关设备的设计、制造和操作方面仍面临多重挑战。这项工作专门旨在减轻与DLD芯片设计和制造相关的困难。计算机辅助设计（CAD）掩膜版图文件的设计和生产过程，通常是计算建模分析、优化以及制造基于DLD的微纳流体芯片所必需的，这个过程复杂、耗时，并且通常需要该领域的高水平专业知识。在此，我们报告了一个通用框架，用于自动化设计DLD以及为各种系统生成版图CAD文件的过程，这些系统范围从简单的单个DLD单元到具有/不具有附加上游/下游组件（如入口过滤器、预加载、收集通道和穿通硅通孔）的复杂并行化DLD结构。此外，据我们所知，我们首次在制造工艺流程中采用压印光刻（IL）来定义并行化DLD阵列的精细特征，同时避免与先进光刻工具的可及性和成本相关的问题。对于并行化DLD架构，我们还报告了一种新的制造工艺流程，旨在减轻与高产率制造穿通硅通孔相关的问题。我们通过设计和制造多个从水性介质中分离微球（0.6μm和1.3μm）的设备，展示了我们开发的设计和制造框架的一些应用案例。我们相信，我们的设计自动化软件包提供了一个用户友好的工作流程，可以显著减轻与DLD结构设计和优化相关的障碍，而我们的制造工艺流程可以为制造微米和亚微米级DLD芯片提供一种可行的解决方案。这些创新应该能使更多的群体将DLD技术应用于他们的研究中，特别是在芯片实验室应用方面。
