ChipCE/spl trade/: A silicon microsystem for migration, separation and detection of DNA

Hand held point-of-care systems for clinical diagnostics provide an interdisciplinary frontier that has the potential to transform the way diagnosis is done today. Ability to migrate, fractionate and detect charged bio-objects in a completely portable microsystem is a vital component of these hand held point of care systems. These capabilities have been built into a free solution capillary electrophoresis (FSCE) system with on-chip electrical detection. This work reports the principles, fabricated structure, measurement approach and the results obtained for a new schema for on-chip capillary electrophoresis realized in a system that we call the ChipCE/spl trade/.