Electrodes Architectures for Dielectrophoretic-Based Cells Manipulation in LoCs: Modeling, Simulation and Experimental Results

In this paper several electrodes architectures are modeled, implemented and compared in order to optimize the integration of hybrid micro-system for lab-on-a-chips (LoC). This study highlights the limitations of finite element simulations for a hybrid and complex micro-systems and propose new approach to overpass some fabrication constraints in a LoC design. The proposed LoC is based on dielectrophoresis for cell manipulation and capacitive sensing architecture. Particles used in this study has a diameter less than 10m which is close to the electrode dimensions. In this case conventional dielectrophoresis theory has some limitations. In order to handle particles in the range of micrometers, we describe four different electrode architectures which are the conventional square electrode array whose dimensions are 10m × 10m, the 10m width L-shaped electrode, the star-square electrode and the double side L-shaped electrodes. A comparison is presented at the end of the paper to highlight the advantages of each architecture.