Bonding of soda-lime glass microchips at low temperature

The bonding of glass wafers is an extremely important aspect of microfluidic chip fabrication. Conventionally this is performed using high temperatures over long periods of time. This is time consuming and energy intensive and can have detrimental effects on the quality of the completed device. In this work we have adapted the low temperature HF bonding method that has been used for quartz so that it can be applied to soda lime glass, the most commonly used chip fabrication material. A range of devices were fabricated using this method and the quality of the bond interface was examined using SEM-EDX measurements.