Manufacturing thin ionic polymer metal composite for sensing at the microscale

Ionic polymer metal composites (IPMCs) are a class of materials with a rising appeal in biological micro-electromechanical systems (bio-MEMS) due to their unique properties (low voltage output, bio-compatibility, affinity with ionic medium). While tailoring and improving actuation capabilities of IPMCs is a key motivator in almost all IPMC...

Miniaturized engineered heart tissues from hiPSC-derived triple cell type co-cultures to study human cardiac function

Human heart tissues grown as three-dimensional spheroids and consisting of different cardiac cell types derived from pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) recapitulate aspects of human physiology better than standard two-dimensional models in vitro. They typically consist of less than 5000 cells and are used to measure contraction kinetics although...

An organ-on-chip device with integrated charge sensors and recording microelectrodes

Continuous monitoring of tissue microphysiology is a key enabling feature of the organ-on-chip (OoC) approach for in vitro drug screening and disease modeling. Integrated sensing units are particularly convenient for microenvironmental monitoring. However, sensitive in vitro and real-time measurements are challenging due to the inherently...

Rapid Prototyping of Organ-on-a-Chip Devices Using Maskless Photolithography

Organ-on-a-chip (OoC) and microfluidic devices are conventionally produced using microfabrication procedures that require cleanrooms, silicon wafers, and photomasks. The prototyping stage often requires multiple iterations of design steps. A simplified prototyping process could therefore offer major advantages. Here, we describe a rapid and...

Highly-conformal sputtered through-silicon vias with sharp superconducting transition

This paper describes the microfabrication and electrical characterization of aluminum-coated superconducting through-silicon vias (TSVs) with sharp superconducting transition above 1 K. The sharp superconducting transition was achieved by means of fully conformal and void-free DC-sputtering of the TSVs with Al, and is here demonstrated in up...

A Miniaturized EHT Platform for Accurate Measurements of Tissue Contractile Properties

We present a wafer-scale fabricated, PDMS-based platform for culturing miniaturized engineered heart tissues (EHTs) which allows highly accurate measurements of the contractile properties of these tissues. The design of the platform is an anisometrically downscaled version of the Heart-Dyno system, consisting of two elastic micropillars inside...

Superconducting High-Aspect Ratio Through-Silicon Vias with DC-Sputtered Al for Quantum 3D integration

This paper presents the fabrication and electrical characterization of superconducting high-aspect ratio through-silicon vias DC-sputtered with aluminum. Fully conformal and void-free coating of 300 μm-deep and 50 μmwide vias with Al, a CMOS-compatible and widely available superconductor, was made possible by tailoring a funneled sidewall...

Self-aligned micro-optic integrated photonic platform

In this work, we present the fabrication technology of a monolithically integrated photonic platform combining key components for optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging, thereby including a photonic interferometer, a collimating lens, and a 45^◦ reflecting mirror that directs the light from the interferometer to the collimator....