Polymer MEMS for Flexible Tactile Imaging and Microfluidics

ABSTRACT: In this talk, application of polymers in flexible sensors and microfluidic components will be presented. A 16 x 16 tactile sensor array with 1mm spatial resolution, similar to that of human skin, has been fabricated by stacking multiple layers of PDMS elastomer. Tactile response of a cell has shown a sensitivity of 3%/mN within the full-scale range of 40mN (250kPa). Expandability has been demonstrated by using ACP to tile up the modular arrays. Various tactile images have been successfully captured by one sensor module, as well as the expanded 32 x 32 modular array sensor. Another application of stacked polymer layers will be introduced for high-throughput cellular manipulation using a microfluidic chip with multiple micro-wells in two-dimensional arrays. The chip performs single cell positioning, specific reagent injection, and secretion monitoring for high-throughput cell analysis and drug screening. The implemented device was designed to provide three consecutive functions: autonomous cell capture in multiple micro-wells in a two-dimensional array; active cell isolation; and specific reagents injection into each micro-well. A cell capture experiment has been performed using myoblast stem cells, and the successful positioning of single cells on micro-wells was achieved. Also, the selective injection of various growth factors into specific target cells has been demonstrated and its effects on cell proliferation and differentiation have been monitored.
BIO: Euisik Yoon recently joined the WIMS Center as a faculty in the EECS Department. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1990. His current research interests are in BioMEMS, microfluidic cell assay chips, wireless neural probes, and CMOS image sensors. After getting his Ph.D. degree, he worked for the Fairchild Research Center of the National Semiconductor Corp. in Santa Clara, CA, and Silicon Graphics Inc. in Mountain View, CA, where he worked on deep submicron CMOS integration and MIPS microprocessor design. Before joining Michigan, he took faculty positions at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, and at KAIST, Daejon, Korea. During the academic year of 2000–2001, he was a Visiting Faculty at Agilent Laboratory, Palo Alto, CA. He has served on various Technical Program Committees including IEEE AP-ASIC Conference (2001–2002), Transducers Conference (2003, 2005), IEEE IEDM (2006–2008) and IEEE MEMS Conference (2006, 2009). He also served on the IEEE ISSCC program committee (2003–2007) and was a general chair of International Symposium on Bio Micro & Nanosystems (2005).