Tutorial: your first chip
A chamber with a channel into it and a channel out of it, drawn from an empty document in about ten minutes. It uses only the drawing tools, and every surface it names has a reference page of its own.
1 · A new design
File → New (Ctrl+N). If the open document has unsaved changes, answer the question first —
Discard is the right answer here.
You get the smallest design that resolves: one empty component named Chip, already the root, over a two-slab soft-lithography substrate. Layer 0 is a 100 µm slab patterned 40 µm deep; layer 1 is the cap bonded over it. Layer 0 is the active layer, so that is where your shapes will land.
Press Tab for the 2D top-down view if you are not already in it. Draw in 2D — the grid is square to it, and every shape reads at true size.
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 · 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.
Release, and you have 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 zone shows its detail. The
fill control there reads void — the fluid is inside it.
The chip beside the cursor names what the release will make throughout the gesture, so a refusal is never a surprise. See Regions & compartments.
3 · 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 — and it fabricates nothing on its own, so it shows as a marker
rather than as geometry. It arrives 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 · 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.
Two things happen at once. A wall-bound point is created on that edge — labelled p — and the
channel ch connects your inlet to it, breaking through the wall there. The whole gesture is one
undo step, so Ctrl+Z takes back the channel and the point it made together.
A channel end resolves four ways, in order: a pin or a point, another channel’s body, a region’s wall, and finally empty space. Releasing on the wall is the third of those.
5 · 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 one creates two points: a wall-bound p2 where you started
and a free p3 where you released, joined by the channel ch2.
You now have a chip: fluid enters at point, crosses the chamber, and leaves at p3.
6 · A wider inlet
Click point to select it. The inspector’s lower zone shows its placement, its layer span 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 to 100 µm where it meets the wall. Width is a value
at each vertex, interpolated between them, and a channel end with no width of its own inherits from
its point. Select p and give it 200 as well, and the run comes out one width.
That taper is worth leaving in place for a moment: it is the whole width model on screen. See Channels & points.
7 · 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.
Open the inspector’s Pins tab and tick world on that row. A world port is an opening to the
outside — an inlet, an outlet, a well you punch — and the viewport marks it with a burst. Do the
same for p3.
Everything else stays an interior connection, sealed inside the assembled chip.
8 · The chip in 3D
Press Tab. The slabs are drawn with their depth now: the chamber has a floor, the channels are trenches, and the cap sits over both.
Drag Explode in the Layers zone to open a gap between the two slabs — they are opaque, so that is how you look inside. Right-drag orbits, scroll zooms on the cursor, and F frames the whole design again.
Drag Explode back to 0 when you are done. It is a preference rather than part of the design, and it is remembered — leave a gap and the next launch opens with it.
9 · The design-rule check
Look at the Problems zone. 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.
Under the list, a dim line names the rules this process asks for that have no checker yet, so an empty report is never read as their passing. Nothing here ever blocks an edit or an export — the report states what it found. See Design rules.
If a row does appear, click it: the inspector opens on the thing that would fix it.
10 · A file on disk
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 — this file can be placed as a component library by another
design without converting anything.
The • in the title bar clears when the save lands. It follows your edits rather than a flag, so undoing back to this point reads clean 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.