Six types of equipment for microfluidic chip production process

Microfluidic chips are micro-analytical experimental devices, so they also require some microelectronics and micromechanical manufacturing technologies during production and processing, and the requirements for precision are very high. Currently, six types of equipment are used in the processing of microfluidic chips: glue spreading equipment, glue baking equipment, photolithography machine, injection molding equipment, CNC equipment and microfluidic laser welding equipment.

The first two types of coating equipment and coating baking equipment are used for coating (surface pattern coating for plate making), pre-baking (mid-baking, post-baking) and hardening of the film in the photolithography process;
The photolithography machine is also known as the mask alignment exposure machine. For the microfluidic chip made of silicon wafer, in general, it is the process of coating the surface of the silicon wafer and then transferring the pattern on the mask to the photoresist, or the process of temporarily "copying" the microchannel structure to the silicon wafer.

Injection molding equipment or injection molding machine is easy to understand. In general, the process is the process of using silicon wafers or molds made of glass, metal, plastic and other materials to perform chip injection molding.

The CNC equipment used for microfluidic chips has particularly high precision requirements, so in order to meet the requirements, it is necessary to cooperate with precision detection equipment to control the accuracy of product size and surface roughness.

The last one to be introduced is the laser welding equipment, which can also be said to be plastic laser welding equipment. The working principle is very simple: plastic parts, films and silicone are placed in the mold in the feeding fixture, and then the thickened optical glass will automatically press the product. The laser beam will accurately and firmly weld the microfluidic components. After the welding is completed, the channel geometry will remain the same, and the molten metal will not flow into the narrow channel.

Speaking of plastic laser welding, it is necessary to mention that generally speaking, the closer the compatibility, fusion temperature and matching of plastic laser welding are, the better the final welding effect will be. Therefore, if you generally need to proofread the material, you can select the most suitable equipment.