Microneedle array and insertion guide array for safe use of biomedical applications

摘要

A new method of using silicon microneedle array in Bio-Medical applications is introduced in this work. The hollow microneedle array with the facilitation of an insertion guide array have been designed and fabricated. The needles can be pushed down through the second layer of human skin with less-bending. The tip of microneedle will be led by the insertion guide to pierce the skin perpendicularly. The silicon bulk micromachining technique using an inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etcher has been employed to fabricate the microneedle array and the insertion guide array. The array chips are 5x5 mm~2 for both structures. The needle array chip contains 100 microneedles with 100μm and 30μm of the outer diameter and the hole diameter respectively. The guide array chip is 100 μm-thick and contains 100 guiding holes with 120μm diameter. A buckling test of microneedle shows the result that there was no microneedle broken during the test via the guiding holes. Contrary, there were several microneedles broken during the penetration without the facilitation of the guide. The finite-element analysis also supports the test result. After the insertion with guiding has been tested and proved, a wet etching process was added in order to obtain sharper tips.