Large-area manufacturable active matrix digital microfluidics platform for high-throughput biosample handling
Hanbin Ma, Subao Shi, Kai Jin, Dou Wang, Siyi Hu, Yang Su, Yuehua Zhang, J. Li, Ziyuan Liu, Chen Jiang, L. Feng, Xiaojun Guo, Arokia Nathan
Abstract
We present an active-matrix digital microfluidics platform for bio-sample handling, which demonstrates extension of the ubiquitous and highly-scalable flat-panel technology from displays to bio-applications, and leverage the well-established a-Si thin-film transistor (TFT) manufacturing facilities and excess capacity. The fabricated chip contains 32 × 32 pixels in an active area of 10 cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , which can be individually or simultaneously addressed. Generation and manipulation of liquid droplets at single pixel level with the volume coefficient of variation around 1% is demonstrated. Such performance is substantial improvement over current state-of-the-art (9-pixel resolution and 4% variation). This work opens new possibilities for on-chip in vitro diagnostics in point-of-care testing.