The fabrication of microfluidic structures by means of full-wafer adhesive bonding using a poly(dimethylsiloxane) catalyst

Abstract

In this work, we present the use of a PDMS (poly(dimethylsiloxane)) curing-agent as the intermediate layer for adhesive full-wafer bonding suitable for fabrication of microfluidic structures. The curing-agent of the two-component silicone rubber (Sylgard 184) is spin coated on a substrate, brought into contact with another PDMS layer and heat cured to create an irreversible seal which is as strong as or even stronger than plasma-assisted PDMS bonding. The maximum bond strength is measured to 800 kPa when bonding together PDMS and silicon. The applicability of the new PDMS adhesive bonding method is verified by means of fabricating microfluidic structures. Using this method allows for wafer-level bonding of PDMS to various materials such as PDMS, glass or silicon and more importantly to selectively bond different layers by using a patterned adhesive bonding technique. Moreover, precise alignment of the structural layers is facilitated since curing is initiated upon heat which is an advantage when fabricating multilayer microfluidic devices.

Development of planar Goubau line - microfluidic integrated devices for THz spectroscopy of liquid analytes

“…The cast PDMS was bonded to the substrate using one of two methods depending on the substrate material. Channels were bonded to quartz devices, by a stamp-andstick method [7], (Fig. 1a), in which the PDMS-defined channel was stamped onto a glass slide which had been coated with a layer of wet curing agent, and aligned on the quartz substrate.…”

A Microfluidic Chip for ICPMS Sample Introduction

“…NOTE: The LADE chip is made out of two PDMS pieces that are bonded together by adhesive bonding 24 . The first part contains the microfluidic features.…”

On the fabrication of PDMS micromodels by rapid prototyping, and their use in two‐phase flow studies

“…These techniques involve oxygen plasma [Duffy et al, 1998[Duffy et al, , 1999, corona discharge [Haubert et al, 2006], partial curing of PDMS in an oven [Go and Shoji, 2004;Eddings and Gale, 2006], use of a curing agent [Samel et al, 2007], and stamp/stick [Satyanarayana et al, 2005]. We tried two techniques : oxygen plasma and corona discharge.…”