have a place to easily grow and develop manufacturing microfluidics devices into industrial-scale operations. Even though microfluidics technology has advanced significantly at the academic level, Weller and Montoya Mira say the manufacturing component still needs to catch up. “If you look at the field of microfluidics, the complexity of the devices at the academic level versus the complexity of devices at the industrial level is quite different. The industrial-level devices are a lot simpler,” Montoya Mira says. “If you’re in the lab and 60% of your chips work perfectly, great. That’s perfect. But if 60% is what you’re getting when you’re a company, that’s really, really bad. You need it to be a reproducible science, because if you’re not 100% perfect, your customer is going to get mad at you, they’re not going to buy your devices and they’ll try to trash your company.” “There’s a big difference between making 10 of something and 10,000 of something,” Weller says. To address the question of scalability, the CorMic Hub enables companies to access a business that has been producing single-cell microfluidics at the industrial scale for decades. One of the linchpins of the project is the involvement of Hewlett-Packard. The Corvallis-based printing and software company has been producing microfluidics devices for its inkjet printers at scale since it debuted the ThinkJet printer in 1984. “HP is a world leader in manufacturing microfluidics, and they’ve only just recently started to use that same technology for biomedical printers. They do single-cell dispensing on their print systems and they also use it for additive manufacturing, so they have leveraged that technology substantially in different industries. Now that they’re with the tech hub, they’re making that open to outside users to come in and use it for newer applications,” Weller says. “Essentially, HP will be potentially manufacturing for people, but they don’t have to be the ones who are always creating new products. They’re using the technology of other people.” HP first developed microscopic inkjet printing when an engineer was testing the response of a thin silicon-based film to electrical stimulation. When electricity heated the silicon, the droplets of fluid lying under the film were expelled. Large, industrial inkjet printers, which printed by dropping thousands of tiny droplets on a sign or billboard all at once, already existed, but the discovery allowed HP to miniaturize the system — and become an early adopter of microfluidics technology. Paul Benning, the chief technologist for HP 3D Printing, says the company’s experience manufacturing microfluidics chips at scale is what they hope to share with burgeoning businesses trying to use microfluidics in other disciplines. “Every inkjet print cartridge that you get, on the business end of one of those is a silicon chip that has everything from transistors to microfluidic channels to control features with analog and digital circuitry. It’s really those five capabilities, and for the ability to build and manufacture microfluidic devices at volume, that we are bringing to the tech hub to pursue chip cooling and biotech applications,” says Benning. Benning says HP is the “center of the universe” for microfluidics technology, and that the company is already branching into other applications beyond inkjet printing. “It’s really a way to invite small companies, startups and other interested parties to come and access infrastructure, and also the expertise, the people and capabilities that have been built up around that.” PAUL BENNING, HEWLET-PACKARD OSU College of Engineering professor Tom Weller leads the Corvallis Microfluidics Tech Hub. 20
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==