Fracture mechanism of metal electrode integrated on a chip and fabrication of a poly(ethylene terephthalate) electrophoresis microchip.

Thermal bonding is an important technique to fabricate polymer electrophoresis microchip. However, the metal electrodes deposited on polymer substrate can readily fracture during the thermal bonding. In this paper, poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) was exploited to fabricate the electrophoresis microchip with an integrated gold electrode for amperometric detection.