Tutorial: your first chip
You will draw a chamber with one channel feeding it and one channel draining it, starting from an empty document. It takes about ten minutes and uses only the drawing tools.
1 · Start a new design
File → New (Ctrl+N). If the open document has unsaved changes, answer the question first;
choose Discard.
A new document holds one empty component named Chip, already the root, over a single
soft-lithography slab. That slab is Layer 0: 100 µm thick, with its features 40 µm deep. It is
the only layer and the active one, so your shapes land there.
Press Tab for the 2D top-down view if you are not already in it. That is the view you draw in.
Leave Grid and Snap on in the strip at the top of the left panel. The pitch is 100 µm, so everything you place lands on a round number.
2 · Draw the chamber
Press R for the region tool and drag a rectangle in the middle of the viewport, roughly 2000 µm across. Hold Shift while dragging for a square.
Releasing creates a region, an area carved into layer 0 at that layer’s 40 µm depth. It appears in
the inspector’s Body tab as rg, and the inspector’s lower section shows its detail. The
fill control there reads void, which means the fluid is inside it.
Throughout the gesture, the chip beside the cursor names what the release will make. See Regions & compartments.
3 · Place the inlet point
Press P for the point tool and click once, well to the left of the chamber. A point is a
terminal, a place a channel can end. It fabricates nothing on its own, so it draws as a marker and
not as geometry. It is 100 µm wide and lands in the Body tab as point.
The tool has already returned to Select. A single click of a toolbar button picks a tool for one use; double-click the button to latch it when you want to place several.
4 · Draw the feed channel
Press D for the channel tool. Press on point, drag to the chamber’s left wall, and release
on the wall itself.
The drag makes two children: a wall-bound point on that edge, labelled p, and the channel
ch that connects your inlet to it, breaking through the wall there. One gesture made both, so
Ctrl+Z takes them back together.
Releasing on a wall is one of the four ways a channel end can resolve. See Channels & points.
5 · Draw the outlet channel
Press D again. This time press on the chamber’s right wall and drag out into empty space to the right.
Both ends resolve the same way, so this gesture makes two points: a wall-bound p2 where you
started and a free p3 where you released, joined by the channel ch2.
Fluid enters at point, crosses the chamber, and leaves at p3.
6 · Widen the inlet
Click point to select it. The inspector’s lower section shows its placement, its layer offer and
its width. Drag the width field to scrub it, or type 200 and press Enter.
The channel widens at that end only and tapers back to 100 µm where it meets the wall. Width is a
value at each vertex and is interpolated between them, and a channel end with no width of its own
takes the width of its point. Select p, give it 200 as well, and the channel comes out one
width along its whole run. See Channels & points.
7 · Expose the ports
Right-click point and choose Expose as pin. The point becomes a connection the component
offers to whoever places it, under the same name.
Select point and tick world port in its detail. A world port is an opening to the
outside — an inlet or an outlet — and the viewport marks it with a burst. The side combo beside the
tick says which face of the chip it comes out of; leave it at down. Do the same for p3.
The two ticks are independent: exposing a pin publishes the terminal to whoever places this component, while the world mark cuts a hole in the finished chip. A terminal with neither is an interior connection, sealed inside the assembled chip.
The port is named after the terminal, so rename the point in the label field at the top of its detail if you want the port called something else.
8 · Look at the chip in 3D
Press Tab. Your shapes are drawn with their depth now, 40 µm each, and the wireframe box around them is the 100 µm slab they are cut into.
Right-drag orbits, scroll zooms on the cursor, middle-drag (or Shift+right-drag) pans, and F frames the whole design again.
The chip is open at the top: what seals a soft-lithography device is bonded on at fabrication, and the design does not model it. See Layers, stacks & processes.
9 · Check the design rules
Look at the Problems section. It should read no problems: your channels are wider than the
process’s 10 µm minimum, everything sits at one depth on one face, and the design fits the
substrate.
If a row does appear, click it, and the inspector opens on the child that would fix it. The check never blocks an edit or an export. See Design rules.
10 · Save the file
Ctrl+S. The document has never been saved, so Experiware asks for a path first. Designs are
.exw files, and one format covers both roles: another design can place this file as a component
library without converting anything.
The • in the title bar marks unsaved changes and clears when the file is saved. It tracks your edits, so undoing back to this point clears it again.
Where to go next
- Components, parameters & pins — give Chip parameters, and place it inside another component.
- Regions & compartments — divide that chamber, weld a corridor onto it, stand a post in it.
- Fabrication overrides — make the chamber deeper than the channels running into it.
- Export — the files a process publishes from a finished design.
- Toolbar & tools — every gesture the drawing tools accept, in full.