ABSTRACT
The application of miniaturization in fields such as human genome research, of the drug discovery process in the pharmaceutical industry, clinical diagnostics, or analytical chemistry is increasing the performance of conventional methods, and also changes the approach to analytical data generation and handling with concepts like the ‘‘Labon-a-Chip’’ which sits on a doctor’s desk or at the patient’s bedside. In addition, it opens novel markets and generates new business opportunities [2]. The underlying concept of this development is called µ-TAS, the ‘‘total microanalysis system’’ which arose historically from analytical chemistry. Already in the 1970s, in a remarkable effort, Stephen Terry miniaturized a gas chromatography system and integrated the
complete system on a silicon wafer. Tragically, this work [3] went unnoticed for more than a decade, until in 1990 the conceptual µ-TAS paper was published [4]. This article triggered an avalanche of discoveries and developments of planar microfluidic devices on glass or quartz substrates [5-13], which led to a truly exponential growth of this field (for recent reviews, see e.g. [14,15]), first in academic research alone, but since the mid-90s also on a commercial basis.
