A microfabricated silicon platform with 60 microfluidic chips for rapid mass spectrometric analysis

Abstract

This work presents a way of using silicon microfabrication to take advantage of the rim of a silicon wafer in a novel manner. Our circular multichip platform, which is fabricated using only standard microfabrication techniques, has 60 identical miniaturized micropillar array electrospray ionization (μPESI) chips at the periphery of a silicon wafer. The fabricated platform is fixed on a computer controlled rotating table, in front of a mass spectrometer (MS). After each MS measurement an unused μPESI chip is aligned towards the MS by the programmable rotating table. Our wafer-scale platform enabled measurement of 60 samples in 8 minutes. The samples can also be stored on the platform for later analysis.