Journal
JOURNAL OF MICROMECHANICS AND MICROENGINEERING
Volume 28, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1361-6439/aaa6a8
Keywords
microneedles; fabrication; HF-HNO3; silicon
Categories
Funding
- CNSI Challenge Grant
- Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies through the U.S. Army Research Office [W911NF-09-D-0001, W911NF-12-1-0031]
- Errett-Fischer Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Scalability and manufacturability are impeding the mass commercialization of microneedles in the medical field. Specifically, microneedle geometries need to be sharp, beveled, and completely controllable, difficult to achieve with microelectromechanical fabrication techniques. In this work, we performed a parametric study using silicon etch chemistries to optimize the fabrication of scalable and manufacturable beveled silicon hollow microneedles. We theoretically verified our parametric results with diffusion reaction equations and created a design guideline for a various set of miconeedles (80-160 mu m needle base width, 100-1000 mu m pitch, 40-50 mu m inner bore diameter, and 150-350 mu m height) to show the repeatability, scalability, and manufacturability of our process. As a result, hollow silicon microneedles with any dimensions can be fabricated with less than 2% non-uniformity across a wafer and 5% deviation between different processes. The key to achieving such high uniformity and consistency is a non-agitated HF-HNO3 bath, silicon nitride masks, and surrounding silicon filler materials with well-defined dimensions. Our proposed method is non-labor intensive, well defined by theory, and straightforward for wafer scale mass production, opening doors to a plethora of potential medical and biosensing applications.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available