The lab-on-PCB approach: tackling the μTAS commercial upscaling bottleneck

Abstract

Commercialization of lab-on-a-chip devices is currently the "holy grail" within the μTAS research community. While a wide variety of highly sophisticated chips which could potentially revolutionize healthcare, biology, chemistry and all related disciplines are increasingly being demonstrated, very few chips are or can be adopted by the market and reach the end-users. The major inhibition factor lies in the lack of an established commercial manufacturing technology. The lab-on-printed circuit board (lab-on-PCB) approach, while suggested many years ago, only recently has re-emerged as a very strong candidate, owing to its inherent upscaling potential: the PCB industry is well established all around the world, with standardized fabrication facilities and processes, but commercially exploited currently only for electronics. Owing to these characteristics, complex μTASs integrating microfluidics, sensors, and electronics on the same PCB platform can easily be upscaled, provided more processes and prototypes adapted to the PCB industry are proposed. In this article, we will be reviewing for the first time the PCB-based prototypes presented in the literature to date, highlighting the upscaling potential of this technology. The authors believe that further evolution of this technology has the potential to become a much sought-after standardized industrial fabrication technology for low-cost μTASs, which could in turn trigger the projected exponential market growth of μTASs, in a fashion analogous to the revolution of Si microchips via the CMOS industry establishment.

Disposable Sensors in Diagnostics, Food, and Environmental Monitoring

“…To overcome the shortcomings of using a single material, in most cases, “hybrid” materials (i.e., multicomponent materials) are used to construct disposable sensors at lower costs with better performance compared to single material approaches . The most common hybrids contain multiple materials that combine a specific polymer with standard MEMS/NEMS materials, paper, or other polymers …”

Recent advances in lab-on-a-chip technologies for viral diagnosis

“…(E) Examples of commercial rapid paper-based microfluidic devices (Yetisen et al, 2013). (F) Lab-on-PCB integrating active control diluter (Moschou and Tserepi, 2017). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)…”

“…2F) (Moschou and Tserepi, 2017). The lab-on-PCB system can eliminate most of the obstacles in the commercialization of microfluidic devices based on other platforms: standardization, and systemlevel integration at a minimal cost.…”

Immobilized Polydiacetylene Lipid Vesicles on Polydimethylsiloxane Micropillars as a Surfactin-Based Label-Free Bacterial Sensor Platform

“…The hardness of silicon poses limits to its broad application in the biosensor (Zhou et al, 2010). Other problems are the high cost of the fabrication process and the involvement of dangerous chemicals (Moschou and Tserepi, 2017). These limitations motivated the development of other chip materials that can be easily fabricated and are compatible with broader biological applications.…”