A New Self-Compensated Thermocycler for Polymerase Chain Reaction

This paper presents a new self-compensated thermocycler for polymerase chain reaction (PCR), especially used in DNA amplification process requiring precise thermal control. A new design of micro- heaters to improve the thermal uniformity of the PCR chamber using array-type heaters and a self- compensated mechanism is reported. The feature of this design is that structure change or active thermal compensation is not required. Experimental data show that the spatial variation of temperature distribution is less than ldegC in the PCR chamber at annealing temperature. Besides, the area with thermal variation less than 0.5degC is close to 90 % of the working area.