Microfluidic chip design, from prototype to production.

Experiware is a desktop application for designing microfluidic chips. You compose a chip from parametric components, and it maintains the resolved fluidic model and the layered 2.5D geometry as you edit — checking your design against the fabrication process you are actually going to use.

Download the free beta Windows 10/11 · 7 MB · no account needed

What it does

Everything below is in the beta today.

Channels, points and regions

Draw the fluidic network directly. Channels carry widths along their centerline; regions carry compartments, holes and pockets. Both stay editable as geometry, not as frozen polygons.

Parametric components

Group anything into a reusable component with its own parameters and pins, then place it as many times as you like. Any .exw file can serve as a component library for another.

A real fabrication target

Author the layer stack and the process — soft lithography or injection molding — alongside the design. Depths, wall profiles, draft angles and corner radii are properties of the process, not guesses.

Live design rules

Violations appear in the Problems panel as you work and are marked in the viewport, keyed to the process that governs each layer. You find out before the mask house does.

2D and 3D, one model

Switch between a top-down view and the layered 2.5D solid with Tab. Explode the stack to see a buried layer.

Fabrication export

Export the package as DXF, grouped by the process that governs each part, with the plan shown before anything is written.

Download the beta

Free for non-commercial use. It runs entirely on your machine — nothing is uploaded, ever.

Windows will warn you the first time. A blue “Windows protected your PC” box appears because the program is not yet code-signed — not because anything is wrong with the file. Click More info, then Run anyway.

Requirements. 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, and a GPU with working Vulkan or DirectX 12 drivers. There is nothing to install: unzip the folder and run Experiware.exe.

macOS or Linux? Not yet — but tell me and I will know it is worth building.

Using it

Free for non-commercial use — academic research, teaching, study, personal projects, and evaluating whether it suits you. Research counts even when it is funded.
Commercial use is by arrangement. Designing something you or your employer intend to make or sell needs a licence — write to [email protected] and we will sort it out.
Your designs are yours. Everything the tool produces belongs to you, with no conditions attached and nothing claimed.
Later there will be free, academic and commercial tiers. This beta is not them, and nothing here promises what they will cost.

Full text: the beta licence.

Where it is going

Not in the beta, and stated here so nobody downloads it expecting them: a scripting API, import and export of the Parchmint interchange format, flow-resistance readouts, and — the longer effort — droplet-microfluidics simulation as a tier inside the same tool. If one of those is what would make this useful to you, that is worth an email.