Electrowetting-on-Dielectric Based Economical Digital Microfluidic Chip on Flexible Substrate by Inkjet Printing

In order to get rid of the dependence on expensive photolithography technology and related facilities, an economic and simple design and fabrication technology for digital microfluidics (DMF) is proposed. The electrodes pattern was generated by inkjet printing nanosilver conductive ink on the flexible Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate with a 3D circuit board printer, food wrap film was attached to the electrode array to act as the dielectric layer and Teflon(®) AF was sprayed to form a hydrophobic layer. The PET substrate and food wrap film are low cost and accessible to general users. The proposed flexible DMF chips can be reused for a long time by replacing the dielectric film coated with hydrophobic layer. The resolution and conductivity of silver traces and the contact angle and velocity of the droplets were evaluated to demonstrate that the proposed technology is comparable to the traditional DMF fabrication process. As far as the rapid prototyping of DMF is concerned, this technology has shown very attractive advantages in many aspects, such as fabrication cost, fabrication time, material selection and mass production capacity, without sacrificing the performance of DMF. The flexible DMF chips have successfully implemented basic droplet operations on a square and hexagon electrode array.