A one-step soft lithography technique for making microfluidic pdms chips with macro-scale structures

A one-step molding technique was developed to fabricate a PDMS chip containing both microstructures and macrostructures such as inlets, outlets and reservoirs. The most critical step for molding was to establish the connection between macroscale and microscale features, which was achieved by blocking the through hole of a rigid mold with an elastic cone. The elastic cones and macrostructures were fabricated on the elastic mold, while micro structures were fabricated on the rigid mold. As a result, a digital PCR chip with four sample throughputs has been successfully fabricated. This technique is expected to be used to fabricate a wide variety of microfluidic chips.