Polycarbonate Nanofluidic Chip Fabrication Technique by Hot Embossing and Thermal Bonding

Abstract

Nanofluidic devices are becoming increasingly critical for medical, chemical and biological applications. In this paper, a 2D Polycarbonate (PC) nanofluidic chip was fabricated by hot embossing and thermal bonding method. In this paper, the effect of the hot embossing parameters on the replication precision of 2D PC nanochannels was investigated by finite element method. To increase the bonding rate of the chip, the parameters of the thermal bonding process were optimized. Under the optimized parameters the 2D PC nanofluidic chip was successfully fabricated. The results show that the replication precision of the nanochannels can be as high as 97% and the bonding rate of the chip can be 96%. The fluorescent images demonstrate that there is no block and leakage through the whole microchannels and nanochannels. It is expected that this fabrication method has great potential to fabricate 2D nanofluidic chip with low cost and high precision.