Large-area manufacturable active matrix digital microfluidics platform for high-throughput biosample handling

We present an active-matrix digital microfluidics platform for bio-sample handling, which demonstrates extension of the ubiquitous and highly-scalable flat-panel technology from displays to bio-applications, and leverage the well-established a-Si thin-film transistor (TFT) manufacturing facilities and excess capacity. The fabricated chip contains 32 × 32 pixels in an active area of 10 cm
²
, which can be individually or simultaneously addressed. Generation and manipulation of liquid droplets at single pixel level with the volume coefficient of variation around 1% is demonstrated. Such performance is substantial improvement over current state-of-the-art (9-pixel resolution and 4% variation). This work opens new possibilities for on-chip in vitro diagnostics in point-of-care testing.