Electro-thermal simulation and design of silicon based bioanalytical micro-devices

This paper present a silicon microchips designed for rapid, simultaneous testing of samples for DNA amplification by polymerase chain reaction-PCR. Over the last years a lot of researches have been focused in the field of miniaturized reaction and separation systems, including the construction of fully integrated ´lab-on-chip´ systems. Microreactors, which initially targeted DNA based reactions such as the polymerase chain reaction, are now used in several other chemical and biochemical assays. We have analysed the temperature uniformity and distribution on the PCR-chip, the temperature distribution of DNA sample, and the transient temperature difference between the heater and DNA sample.