Microfluidics as a science of sub-millimeter fluids gives the opportunity for opening a new way of creating optoelectronic chips – made from graphene, according to the scientists of University of Exeter. In this case their will be using graphene flakes and other two dimensions materials in CMOS structure. Main puprporse of this goal is optofluidic waveguide system that gives the possibility of  monitoring them by using Raman spectroscopy.

Example of microfluidic chip (circuit board)

Microfluids are in the form of liquid crystals with microfluidic cell storting, enabling storage of optically active flakes of graphene oxide in a controlled manner.

As the first solution for using this microfluidic technology, a team of scientists announced manipulating trajectory of „swimming” graphene flakes placed in a liquid suspension forming tuneable photonic crystals. The second solution they mentioned was building the solid-state structures by using microfluids for controlled flake deposition from the liquid.

Due to the sparse distribution of particles involved, conventional optical measurement techniques do not meet the sensitivity requirements. Because of this, to improve the sensitivity researchers from the University have used a fixed filtering structures (waveguides of different shapes in the lower-transparent layer).

Source: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep42120