Fabrication of electrophoresis devices on quartz and glass substrates using a bonding with HF solution

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) devices have been fabricated in a small size on quartz or glass substrates. To fabricate a quartz device, we developed a novel bonding method with HF solution. HF-bonding was carried out with 1% HF solution with a pressure of /spl sim/40 gf/cm/sup 2/. With an evaluation of the new bonding method, we confirm that the method ensures enough strength, air tightness and optical property. An advantage of this method is simplicity of bonding process in comparison with a conventional thermal bonding. Using the glass /spl mu/CE devices, we obtained the original device design and process procedure through our experiments. It was proved that /spl mu/CE chip permits to apply higher electric power in comparison with the conventional CE system. We show that our design permits to perform quantitative sample injection (several 10 pl or less), effective separation (the number of theoretical plates is over 2500) and high speed analysis (over 10 times as high as the conventional CE system). These features promise an advantage of /spl mu/CE devices over conventional analytical equipments.