Glass Micromachining and Applications of Glass

Dear Colleagues,

Although glass machining techniques have been around for some time, micromachining of glass is relatively new. Adoption of technologies from the silicon MEMS field such as wet chemical etching and micro powderblasting has led to glass-specific, wafer-scale and thereby cost-effective manufacturing processes. This combination of cost-effective and high accuracy machining in turn has led to a whole range of new application areas for glass devices, such as glass lab-on-a-chip, high optical quality flowcells, microreactors and hermetic packaging of sensors.

Obviously, the development of machining techniques has been and still is progressing further, for instance enabling high aspect ratio laser machining of structure types that would otherwise be impossible. For this reason we invite submission of papers, both on glass micromachining techniques in the broadest sense and on applications of glass microfabrication. This latter could include, but is not limited to: lab-on-a-chip, flowcells, microreactors, microchip capillary electrophoresis, wafer-scale packaging and glass MEMS.

Dr. Marko T. Blom
Guest Editor