Rapid fabrication of glass-based microfluidic chips utilizing a femtosecond laser

This paper presents a method of using a femtosecond laser scriber to perform the direct-writing ablation of glass substrate for microfluidic applications. Microfluidic designs were created using commercial layout software and were converted into laser scriber control signals to reproduce the desired microchannel configuration on the surface of a glass substrate. The surface quality of the ablated microchannels was examined using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) surface measurement techniques. Results show that a two-step defocusing laser beam method and post-machining annealing can obtain a smooth channel wall. The practicality of the proposed approach is demonstrated by fabricating three microfluidic chips: a capillary electrophoresis microchip, an Agilent 2100 bioanalyzer DNA LabChip, and a microarray chip. The results of this study confirm that the proposed defocused ablation technique is a viable solution for the rapid fabrication of a wide variety of glass-based microfluidic chips.