Engineering
Manufacturing Microfluidic Devices Using Soft Lithography and Its Resolution Limits
Quick fact
Soft lithography can routinely create microfluidic channels with features as small as a few micrometers, but the real resolution limit is not set by the rubber-like stamp itself—it's inherited from the photolithography used to make the original master mold, which is fundamentally limited by the wavelength of light.
Why this is interesting
You've seen the tiny channels of a microfluidic chip—but how do you actually carve channels narrower than a human hair by hand? The answer is a clever trick borrowed from rubber stamps.