Uniplanar microwave heater for digital microfluidics

This paper reports on a 4 GHz microwave droplet heater for digital microfluidics. The uniplanar device was fabricated using a gold-on-quartz process and was optimized for uniform heating within a 1 μL droplet. Microwave measurements show excellent agreement with COMSOL simulations. The uniformity of the induced temperature within the droplet was experimentally validated using fluorescence microscopy using a temperature sensitive fluorophore.