Soft-lithography fabrication of microfluidic features using thiol-ene formulations

Abstract

In this work, a novel thiol-ene based photopolymerizable resin formulation was shown to exhibit highly desirable characteristics, such as low cure time and the ability to overcome oxygen inhibition, for the photolithographic fabrication of microfluidic devices. The feature fidelity, as well as various aspects of the feature shape and quality, were assessed as functions of various resin attributes, particularly the exposure conditions, initiator concentration and inhibitor to initiator ratio. An optical technique was utilized to evaluate the feature fidelity as well as the feature shape and quality. These results were used to optimize the thiol-ene resin formulation to produce high fidelity, high aspect ratio features without significant reductions in feature quality. For structures with aspect ratios below 2, little difference (<3%) in feature quality was observed between thiol-ene and acrylate based formulations. However, at higher aspect ratios, the thiol-ene resin exhibited significantly improved feature quality. At an aspect ratio of 8, raised feature quality for the thiol-ene resin was dramatically better than that achieved by using the acrylate resin. The use of the thiol-ene based resin enabled fabrication of a pinched-flow microfluidic device that has complex channel geometry, small (50 μm) channel dimensions, and high aspect ratio (14) features.