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This thesis presents back-end processing steps for polymer labs-on-a-chip which permit the realization of complex applications like biological assays on-chip. Pre-treatment for surface cleaning, hydrophilization to promote capillary action, selective hydrophobization for flow control, dry reagent pre-storage to enable fully integrated chips as well as biocompatible sealing to ensure operation and biological activity after processing are covered. Most of these processing steps are developed on a sample lab-on-a-chip which aims for the on-chip detection of mRNA by nucleic acid sequence based amplification (NASBA) for e.g. cervical cancer diagnostics.

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Lutz Riegger was born 1978 and studied Microsystems Engineering at the University of Freiburg, Germany. From 2005 to 2008, he was a research engineer at the Lab for MEMS Applications at IMTEK. In parallel, he worked for Biofluidix, a start-up company specializing in dispensing technology. He received his PhD degree for the presented work in 2010.

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