Photolithography-free fabrication of photoresist-mold for rapid prototyping of microfluidic PDMS devices

摘要

Traditional soft lithography based PDMS device fabrication requires complex procedures carried out in a clean room. Herein, we report a photolithography-free method that rapidly produces PDMS devices in 30 min. By using a laser cutter to ablate a tape, a male photoresist mold can be obtained within 5 min by a simple heating-step, which offers significant superiority over currently used photolithographybased method. Since it requires minimal energy to cut the tape, our fabrication strategy shows good resolution(~ 100 μm) and high throughput. Furthermore, the micro-mold height can be easily controlled by changing the tape types and layers. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrated that the fabricated PDMS devices are compatible with biochemical reactions such as quenching reaction of KI to fluorescein and cell culture/staining. Collectively, our strategy shows advantages of low input, simple operation procedure and short fabrication time, therefore we believe this photolithography-free method could serve as a promising way for rapid prototyping of PDMS devices and be widely used in general biochemical laboratories.