Parylene as a New Membrane Material for BioMEMS Applications Thesis by Bo Lu Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering California Institute of Technology The work in this thesis aims to use MEMS and microfabrication technologies to develop two types of parylene membrane devices for biomedical applications. The first device is the parylene membrane filter for cancer detection. The presence ...

This article presents design and testing of a microfluidic platform for immunoassay. The method is based on sandwiched ELISA, whereby the primary antibody is immobilized on nitrocelluose and, subsequently, magnetic beads are used as a label to detect the analyte. The chip takes approximately 2 h and 15 min to complete the assay. A Hall Effect sensor using 0.35-μm BioMEMS TSMC technology (Taiwan...

The alarming growth of the antibiotic-resistant superbugs methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) is driving the development of new technologies to investigate antibiotics and their modes of action. We report the label-free detection of vancomycin binding to bacterial cell wall precursor analogues (mucopeptides) on cantilever arrays, with 1...

Water-activated microbatteries with long shelf life have been demonstrated based on a one-mask micromachining process for the first time. Magnesium is used as the anode and silver chloride or cuprous chloride is used as the cathode in the prototype demonstration. Adding water or aqueous solutions activate the electrochemical reactions between the anode and cathode to release electricity. Experi...

This article details the construction and testing of a phenotypic assay system that models in vivo cardiac function in a parallel in vitro environment with human stem cell derived cardiomyocytes. The major determinants of human whole-heart function were experimentally modeled by integrating separate 2D cellular systems with BioMicroelectromechanical Systems (BioMEMS) constructs. The model featu...

We report the use of nanostructured TiO2 (NST) as porous cellular adhesion interfaces for microsystems. Integrated NST films and pad arrays with sponge-like morphology were fabricated by aqueous oxidation of Ti films followed by thermal annealing. Cell culture studies indicate significantly (t < 0.02 from the student’s t-test) greater initial attachment of mouse fibroblast cells on porous NST t...

The development of a method for integrating highly efficient energy conversion materials onto stretchable, biocompatible rubbers could yield breakthroughs in implantable or wearable energy harvesting systems. Being electromechanically coupled, piezoelectric crystals represent a particularly interesting subset of smart materials that function as sensors/actuators, bioMEMS devices, and energy con...

Air trench structure for reduced-size bends in low ( n=0.01-0.1) and medium ( n=0.1-0.3) index contrast waveguides is proposed. Local high index contrast at bends is achieved by introducing air trenches. An air trench bend consists of cladding tapers to avoid junction loss, providing adiabatic mode shaping between low and high index contrast regions. Drastic reduction in effective bend radius i...

Optical mapping is a method of whole genome analysis that was originally introduced in 1995 1. It involves the generation of ordered restriction maps for entire genomes using classical molecular biology and biological microelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS) microfluidic techniques adopted from the semiconductor industry. The goal of this paper is to review the pertinent literature on optical m...

SUEX epoxy Thick Dry Film Sheets (TDFS) are a promising material for a wide range of MEMS applications. They contain a cationically cured modified epoxy formulation utilizing an antimony-free photo acid generator (PAG). A highly controlled solvent-less process provides uniform resist coatings between two throw-away layers of protective polyester (PET) film in varying thicknesses ranging from 10...