Overview of Advances in Microfluidics and Microfabrication

Miniaturized instrumentation and reactors have attracted great interest in the last decade. The first reported use of a microchip was in 1979, when a gas chromatograph air analyzer was fabricated on a silicon wafer (1 ). It was not until several years later, when flow injection analysis was performed on a chip, that microchips gained attention (2 ). Over the last decade, research in integrated microfluidic devices (which are typically referred to as lab-on-a-chip devices or micro total analysis systems [μTAS]) has expanded to include sample preparation, fluid handling, microreactors, separation systems, cell handling, and cell culturing. The incorporation of these techniques has led to microfluidic devices that have been used to perform capillary electrophoresis-based separations, magnetic microparticle-based separations, immunoassays, DNA analysis, and clinical diagnostics, along with the design of highly efficient microreactors (3 ,4 ). They have been applied in medical analysis, environmental monitoring, biochemical analysis, and microchemistry (4 ).