Recent advances in microfluidics and micro/nano fabrication
technologies led to the development of various miniaturized PCR
systems suitable for biological applications [5,10–12]. These
systems utilized unique characteristics of microtechnologies, such
as small sample/reagent volume, large surface to volume ratio,
and compact size for fast and accurate analysis of biological
samples at low cost. These microchip PCR systems typically have
very small reaction chambers that contain micro- to nano-liter
scale reagents, significantly reducing the time for each thermal
cycling step. However, these systems do not employ real-time
detection, and thus require additional methods or devices such as
gel electrophoresis for the quantification of amplicons. In recent
years, several real-time microchip PCR systems integrated with
optical detection systems have been developed with promising
results, but mostly for clinical diagnosis applications [13–22],
Julich et al. has reported the one real-time microchip PCR system
for plant pathogen detection [23], but the system still requires
various auxiliary instruments such as a laptop, fluidic pump, electrical readout and temperature regulation system which are
larger than the laptop size.