Reversible sealing techniques for microdevice applications

Reversible sealing of two different functional layers is an advancing and effective technique for the fabrication of microdevices. Reversible sealing enables microdevices to be dismountable and reusable, which are promising features for the high throughput analysis by means of spatial, temporal, and parallel process. It is therefore reversible sealing is potentially being used for various research fields such as micro and nanodevice fabrication, flow analysis at microscale, biomolecule analysis, cell analysis and other related fields. This review reports on the materials and techniques used for reversible sealing and their applications in various research areas, and illustrates their advantages and disadvantages. We provide examples, where necessary and comment on the outlook for reversible sealing applied to microdevices.