Design Automation for Microfluidic Biochips Considering Efficiency and Reliability

Abstract:
In recent years, microfluidic biochips have revolutionized traditional biochemical experiments and diagnoses in application fields such as pharmacy, biotechnology and health care, owing to their exact sample manipulation, economical reagent consumption and miniaturized dimensions. With increasing system integration, however, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools are required to leverage human productivity in order to deal with ever increasing chip complexity. In this paper, we propose two enhancements to the design of microfluidic biochips from the point of view of EDA. In the first enhancement, we propose to use transportation channels as temporary storage for intermediate results of operations. In the second enhancement, we propose to generate dynamic devices on a valve array, in order to reduce the maximum switching count of valves so that the lifetime of the chip can be extended. Experiments demonstrate that the two techniques can improve the efficiency and lifetime of biochips significantly.