298 research outputs found

    Transport or Store? Synthesizing Flow-based Microfluidic Biochips using Distributed Channel Storage

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    Flow-based microfluidic biochips have attracted much atten- tion in the EDA community due to their miniaturized size and execution efficiency. Previous research, however, still follows the traditional computing model with a dedicated storage unit, which actually becomes a bottleneck of the performance of bio- chips. In this paper, we propose the first architectural synthe- sis framework considering distributed storage constructed tem- porarily from transportation channels to cache fluid samples. Since distributed storage can be accessed more efficiently than a dedicated storage unit and channels can switch between the roles of transportation and storage easily, biochips with this dis- tributed computing architecture can achieve a higher execution efficiency even with fewer resources. Experimental results con- firm that the execution efficiency of a bioassay can be improved by up to 28% while the number of valves in the biochip can be reduced effectively.Comment: ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 201

    Synthesis of Digital Microfluidic Biochips with Reconfigurable Operation Execution

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    Compilation and Synthesis for Fault-Tolerant Digital Microfluidic Biochips

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    Pin-count reduction for continuous flow microfluidic biochips

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    Microfluidic very large-scale integration for biochips: Technology, testing and fault-tolerant design

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    Microfluidic biochips are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers by integrating all the necessary functions for biochemical analysis using microfluidics. Biochips are used in many application areas, such as, in vitro diagnostics, drug discovery, biotech and ecology. The focus of this paper is on continuous-flow biochips, where the basic building block is a microvalve. By combining these microvalves, more complex units such as mixers, switches, multiplexers can be built, hence the name of the technology, “microfluidic Very Large-Scale Integration” (mVLSI). A roadblock in the deployment of microfluidic biochips is their low reliability and lack of test techniques to screen defective devices before they are used for biochemical analysis. Defective chips lead to repetition of experiments, which is undesirable due to high reagent cost and limited availability of samples. This paper presents the state-of-the-art in the mVLSI platforms and emerging research challenges in the area of continuous-flow microfluidics, focusing on testing techniques and fault-tolerant design

    Scheduling and Fluid Routing for Flow-Based Microfluidic Laboratories-on-a-Chip

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    Microfluidic laboratories-on-a-chip (LoCs) are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers and are able to integrate the necessary functions for biochemical analysis on-chip. There are several types of LoCs, each having its advantages and limitations. In this paper we are interested in flow-based LoCs, in which a continuous flow of liquid is manipulated using integrated microvalves. By combining several microvalves, more complex units, such as micropumps, switches, mixers, and multiplexers, can be built. We consider that the architecture of the LoC is given, and we are interested in synthesizing an implementation, consisting of the binding of operations in the application to the functional units of the architecture, the scheduling of operations and the routing and scheduling of the fluid flows, such that the application completion time is minimized. To solve this problem, we propose a list scheduling-based application mapping (LSAM) framework and evaluate it by using real-life as well as synthetic benchmarks. When biochemical applications contain fluids that may adsorb on the substrate on which they are transported, the solution is to use rinsing operations for contamination avoidance. Hence, we also propose a rinsing heuristic, which has been integrated in the LSAM framework
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