The optofluidic microscope - A high resolution microscope-on-a-chip system

In this article, a complete on-chip high resolution OFM device is presented. The OFM method abandons the conventional microscope design and, instead, shares some similarities with direct shadow imaging method where the target object is directly placed on top of a CCD or CMOS imaging sensor chip. In direct shadow imaging, the image resolution is no better than the sensor pixel size. As the typical sensor pixel size is around 10 microns, direct shadow imaging systems are unable to provide images that are comparable in resolution to those of conventional microscopes.