Packaging of disposable chips for bioanalytical applications

Abstract

The need for point-of-care or point-of-use diagnostic sensors in the health care industry as well as for food and water pathogen testing has been a major factor in the development of low-cost microfluidic devices. Polymer materials have been the obvious choice due to their cost effectiveness. Whereas, due to significant advances in MEMS manufacturing and microelectronic packaging, a significant body of knowledge is available for manufacturing and packaging semiconductor-based or glass-based bioanalytical microdevices, packaging know-how for polymer-based microfluidic devices is not as readily available. In this paper, the realization of microfluidic packages by bonding several stacked layers of microstructured polymer films in a reel-to-reel manufacturing system is shown to be promising approach. The smart division between disposable and reusable system parts as well as the careful selection of materials, based on microstructuring, bonding, biocompatibility and autofluorescence criteria may lead to bioanalytical devices with a very competitive cost of ownership per test. For the realization of such microfluidic disposables, microstructuring technologies based on UV laser micromachining, bonding technologies based on thermal diffusion, adhesives and microwave sealing using conductive polymers, and surface modification approaches for the reduction of non-specific protein binding are discussed.