Back-end Processing in Lab-on-a-Chip Fabrication

This thesis presents back-end processing steps for polymer labs-on-a-chip which permit the realization of complex applications like biological assays on-chip. Pre-treatment for surface cleaning, hydrophilization to promote capillary action, selective hydrophobization for flow control, dry reagent pre-storage to enable fully integrated chips as well as biocompatible sealing to ensure operation and biological activity after processing are covered. Most of these processing steps are developed on a sample lab-on-a-chip which aims for the on-chip detection of mRNA by nucleic acid sequence based amplification (NASBA) for e.g. cervical cancer diagnostics.

Autorentext

Lutz Riegger was born 1978 and studied Microsystems Engineeringat the University of Freiburg, Germany. From 2005 to 2008, he wasa research engineer at the Lab for MEMS Applications at IMTEK. Inparallel, he worked for Biofluidix, a start-up companyspecializing in dispensing technology. He received his PhD degreefor the presented work in 2010.