A microfluidic chip is a set of micro-channels etched or molded into a material ( glass, silicon or polymer such as PDMS, for PolyDimethylSiloxane). The micro- channels forming the microfluidic chip are connected together in order to achieve the desired features (mix, pump, sort, control bio-chemical environment). This network of microchannels incorporated into the microfluidic chip is linked to the macro-environment by several holes of different dimensions hollowed out through the chip. It is through these pathways that fluids are injected into and evacuated from . Output holes are built through the chip and serve as links between the microchannels network and the macro-environment.
A drawback of DNA and protein arrays is that they are neither reconfigurable nor scalable after manufacture.
Digital microfluidics has been described . Our mission at microfluidic ChipShop is to shrink the biological and chemical laboratory in order to bring lab-on-a- chip systems into daily laboratory life at a reasonable cost. To compare, human hair is about 1micron thick. Microfluidic devices have microchannels ranging from submicron to few millimeters. Microfluidics has been increasingly used in the biological sciences, because precise and controlled experiments can be conducted at lower cost and faster pace.