Chemical analysis in photostructurable glass chips

We have fabricated a capillary electrophoresis (CE) chip from photostructurable glass. This material allows, unlike conventional amorphous glasses, the fabrication of microstructures, namely micro-channels with an aspect ratio of >1 using the wet etching processes. The high aspect ratio allows, for a given channel cross-section, a longer optical path length resulting in improved detection limits for optical detection methods. This paper describes the fabrication of a single depth photostructurable glass device, with dimensions of 500 μm depth and 200 μm width, which was characterised with the CE separation of amino-acids.