Improvement of the thermal resistance of thin film heaters on glass substrate for lab-on-chip applications

This paper describes a novel and easily manufacturable method for increasing the thermal resistance of microheaters fabricated on glass substrates, thus decreasing the thermal dissipation of the devices. An automatic sawing machine was exploited to dig 240 ?m wide trenches in order to thermally isolate the heater from the glass substrate and four different layouts of the trenches have been investigated. An improvement of the thermal resistance up to 217% on a heat sink and 30% in air has been obtained. The thermal capacitance was also considerably decreased, thus improving the dynamic thermal behavior.