Automatic fabrication system for plastic microfluidic chips

An automatic fabrication system for batch production of plastic microfluidic chips was developed. The fabricated chips can be used for capillary electrophoresis analysis. The processing technique of chip fabrication mainly includes three steps: microchannel fabrication using hot-embossing technique, precise alignment of the chip's substrate and cover, thermal bonding of the substrate and the cover. Hot-embossing machine, automatic aligning equipment for transparent substrates and thermal bonding machine were developed according to the processing technique. The automatic fabrication system and its constitutional equipments, the embedded processing techniques and auxiliary functions are described and explained in the paper. The auxiliary functions, such as automatic de-embossing and pre-joining of the plastic substrate and cover, are realized for fully automatic fabrication.