Silicon and Glass Micromachining

The past two decades have seen rapid advancement of Lab on a Chip (LOC) systems with applications ranging from gas chromatography to capillary electrophoresis, and more recently to high-pressure chemistry and single cell analysis. For many applications in clinical medicine, biology and chemistry, silicon and glass may still be the preferred materials. The mechanical rigidity, chemical resistance, and low permeability properties of silicon and glass, combined with the optical transparency of glass, make them a good choice for many demanding LOC applications. The large and well developed silicon and glass micromachining toolbox provide the capability to obtain microstructures with high precision and repeatability. In addition, scaling device dimensions down to the nanometer scale is relatively straight forward using silicon and glass micromachining, which is important for emerging fields, such nanofluidics and nanosensing.