Abstract
In the past decade, femtosecond (fs) laser microfabrication has received significant attention because of its powerful three-dimensional (3D) integrating and manufacturing capabilities. A series of multifunctional micro-components and micro-devices, including microoptics, microfluidics, micromechanics, microelectrics, microplasmonics, and so on, can be fabricated and integrated in glass chips with true 3D configurations using a unified fs laser microprocessing technique. For this reason, this technology is particularly suitable for fabricating lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices, which have already created a revolution in the fields of chemical, biological, and medical research. A LOC device, due to its highly integration, standardization and automation, allows for performing chemical and biological analyses with ease of use, low sample and reagent consumption, low waste production, high speed of analysis, and high reproducibility. In this paper, we will review the 3D femtosecond laser fabrication of the multifunctional micro-components in glasses as well as their integration. In addition, we will report the latest progress in this active research field, e.g., the fabrication of a tunable microfluidic waveguide, selective surface metallization on dielectrics, and the formation of surface-enhanced-Raman-scattering (SERS) substrate, etc.
