Title: Hybrid integrated circuit/microfluidic chips for the control of living cells and ultra-small biomimetic containers
Description: This thesis describes the development of a versatile platform for performing biology and chemistry experiments on a chip, using the integrated circuit (IC) technology of the commercial electronics industry. This work represents an important step towards miniaturizing the complex chemical and biological tasks used for diagnostics, research, and manufacturing into automated and inexpensive chips. Hybrid IC/microfluidic chips are developed in this thesis to simultaneously control many individual living cells and small volumes of fluid. Taking inspiration from cellular biology, phospholipid bilayer vesicles are used to package pL volumes of fluid on the chips. The chips can be programmed to trap and position, deform, set the temperature of, electroporate, and electrofuse living cells and vesicles. The fast electronics and complex circuitry of ICs enable thousands of living cells and vesicles to be simultaneously controlled on the chip, allowing many parallel, well-controlled biological and chemical operations to be performed in parallel.

The hybrid chips consist of a microfluidic chamber built directly on top of a custom IC, that uses integrated electronics to create local electric and magnetic fields above the chip's surface. The chips operate in three distinct modes, controlled by setting the frequency of the electric field. Electric fields at kHz frequencies are used to induce electroporation and electrofusion, electric fields at MHz frequencies are used for dielectrophoresis (DEP) to trap and move objects, and electric fields at GHz frequencies are used for dielectric heating. In addition, magnetophoresis, using magnetic fields created with DC current on the chip, is used to deform and to position objects tagged with magnetic nanoparticles. To demonstrate these functions two custom hybrid IC/microfluidic chips and a droplet based PDMS microfluidic device with external electronics are presented. The laboratory functions demonstrated on these chips provide important building blocks for a versatile lab-on-a-chip platform that can be built on the well-developed IC technology of the commercial electronics industry.