This review summarizes and compares the available surface treatment and bonding techniques (e.g., corona triggered surface activation, oxygen plasma surface activation, chemical gluing, and mixed techniques) and quality/bond-strength testing methods (e.g., pulling test, shear test, peel test, leakage test) for bonding PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) with other materials, such as PDMS, glass, silicon, PET (polyethylene terephthalate), PI (polyimide), PMMA (poly(methyl methacrylate)), PVC (polyvinyl chloride), PC (polycarbonate), COC (cyclic olefin copolymer), PS (polystyrene) and PEN (polyethylene naphthalate). The optimized process parameters for the best achievable bond strengths are collected for each substrate, and the advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed in detail.

A novel method, a 3D printing technique, in particular, acrylic photopolymer material-based Rapid Prototyping (RPT) have been used to 1) fabricate molds for PDMS (PolyDiMethylSiloxane) casting; 2) fabricate RPT-based microfluidics and 3) fabricate RPT-based research instrument platforms. 3D RPT-based molds have been fabricated in order to cast a PDMS flow cell for a Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) instrument, and to cast a PDMS chamber for cell lysis in a nanobiological sensor. 3D printing has been utilized to create and test several acrylic photopolymer resin-based prototypes for different microfluidic structures (chaotic mixers, reagent and buffer reservoirs, fluid homogenizers) to be deployed for gynecological cervical sample preparation. Besides, RPT technique has been used also to fabricate platform elements for various microfluidic applications

A robust and scalable technology to fabricate ordered gold nanoparticle arrangements on epoxy substrates is presented. The nanoparticles are synthetized by solid-state dewetting on nanobowled aluminum templates, which are prepared by the selective chemical etching of porous anodic alumina (PAA) grown on an aluminum sheet with controlled anodic oxidation. This flexible fabrication technology provides proper control over the nanoparticle size, shape and interparticle distance over a large surface area (several cm2), which enables the fine tuning and optimization of their plasmonic absorption spectra for LSPR and SERS applications between 535–625 nm. The nanoparticles are transferred to the surface of epoxy substrates, which are subsequently selectively etched. The resulting nano-mushrooms arrangements consist of ordered epoxy nanopillars with flat, disk shaped nanoparticles on top and their bulk refractive index sensitivity is between 83–108 nm RIU-1. Label-free DNA detection is successfully demonstrated with the sensors by using a 20 base pair long specific DNA sequence from the parasite Giardia lamblia. A red shift of 6.6 nm in the LSPR absorbance spectrum was detected after the 2 h hybridization with 1 µM target DNA, the achievable LOD was around 5 nM. The reported plasmonic sensor is one of the first surface AuNP/polymer nanocomposite ever reported for the successful label-free detection of DNA.