11 research outputs found
Computer-aided design for multilayer microfluidic chips
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-66).Microfluidic chips fabricated by multilayer soft lithography are emerging as "lab-on-a-chip" systems that can automate biological experiments. As we are able to build more complex microfluidic chips with thousands of components, it becomes possible to build devices which can be programmatically changed to solve multiple problems. However, the current design methodology does not scale. In this thesis, we introduce design automation techniques to multilayer soft lithography microfluidics. Our work focuses on automating the design of the control layer. We present a method to define an Instruction Set Architecture as a hierarchical composition of flows. From this specification, we automatically infer and generate the logic and signals to control the chip. To complete the design automation of the control layer, we suggest a routing algorithm to connect control channels to peripheral I/O ports. To the microfluidic community, we offer a free computer-aided design tool, Micado, which implements our ideas for automation in a practical plug-in to AutoCAD. We have evaluated our work on real chips and our tool has been used successfully by microfluidic designers.by Nada Amin.M.Eng
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BioScript: programming safe chemistry on laboratories-on-a-chip
This paper introduces BioScript, a domain-specific language (DSL) for programmable biochemistry which executes on emerging microfluidic platforms. The goal of this research is to provide a simple, intuitive, and type-safe DSL that is accessible to life science practitioners. The novel feature of the language is its syntax, which aims to optimize human readability; the technical contributions of the paper include the BioScript type system and relevant portions of its compiler. The type system ensures that certain types of errors, specific to biochemistry, do not occur, including the interaction of chemicals that may be unsafe. The compiler includes novel optimizations that place biochemical operations to execute concurrently on a spatial 2D array platform on the granularity of a control flow graph, as opposed to individual basic blocks. Results are obtained using both a cycle-accurate microfluidic simulator and a software interface to a real-world platform