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Shrinky Dinks Build Chips on the Cheap

by Terrence O'Brien on November 13, 2009 at 08:31 AM

Shrinky Dinks Used to Build Chips on the Cheap
Do you remember Shrinky Dinks? That's okay. Neither do most of the Switched staffers -- the bunch of whippersnappers they are [Ed Note: Not true. We love them.]. The once-popular, plastic arts-and-craft set, which first hit the scene in 1973, allowed children to color and cut out shapes on a thin sheet of plastic. When the shapes were put in the oven, they would shrink to one-third of their original width, becoming thick and rigid. Well, it turns out that making tacky charms is just scratching the surface of this toy's potential.

Back in 2006, University of California at Irvine assistant professor Michelle Khine couldn't afford to outfit her lab with the $100,000 worth of equipment needed to create microfluidic chips. Frustrated and impatient, she turned to an updated version of Shrinky Dinks -- one that lets you run the aforementioned plastic sheets through a standard inkjet or laser printer. Needing the chips to create medical diagnostic tests, she took a shot in the dark by printing her chip designs on Shrinky Dinks, and then baking them. When the sheets shrunk, the ink clumped together and formed tiny ridges. She then used the minis as molds for the circuits she made out of a flexible polymer called PDMS.

To her (and everybody else's) surprise, the cheapo chips worked. They're not as accurate as traditional silicon chips, but, according to Khine, they work for most applications, cost less than your average fast-food combo meal, and take only a few minutes to make. What, a few years ago, was just a quirky experiment has been more successful than anyone could have possibly imagined. Since that fateful day, Khine has successfully used the chips to grow stem cells in heart muscle, and she even hopes to use them in the field to diagnose diseases like HIV.

Encouraged by her success, Khine has started experimenting with the process. She's tried layering multiple sheets, scratching out designs with a syringe instead of printing with ink, and even printing with metal -- which could potentially be used to build cheap and efficient solar panels.

Just remember this the next time you laugh at that one friend who refuses to throw out her Easy-Bake Oven. That cardboard-flavored-brownie maker might just be used to cure cancer one day. [From: Technology Review, via Boing Boing]

Tags: microfluidic, microfluidic chip, MicrofluidicChip, science, shrinky dinks, shrinky-dinks, ShrinkyDinks, top, toys, weird

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