Novel Parylene fabrication technologies for microfluidic systems with reduced mass, volume, and power consumption

This paper presents new fabrication technologies and materials for microfluidic systems with reduced mass, volume, and power consumption. A general microfluidic platform consists of sample preparation, processing and detection. The system requires various fluidic components, e.g., reagent and waste reservoirs, micromixers, microreactors. To fabricate these different components, we have developed four new Parylene microfluidic technologies that are capable of fabricating various features whether they are small (microns), large (centimeters), long (meters), complex, 2D, or 3D. The first Parylene-D microfluidic components are demonstrated. The developed technologies are very promising for portable and in situ detection especially for space mission and field-deployable application.