Stiction-driven sealing of surface micromachined channels

In this paper we report on a new technique for the fabrication of hermetically sealed microchannels. The technique exploits the stiction phenomenon to achieve the sealing of surface micromachined channels. Using this technique we fabricated a microchannel device that can self-close after the drying step that follows the sacrificial etch. Our fabrication method avoids the use of auxiliary access holes or apertures and requires no additional sealing steps. The fabricated self-sealing microchannel devices were showed a leak-rate equal or lower than 3.4·10^-4 mbar·L/s.