Design Optimization for Programmable Microfluidic Devices Integrating Contamination Removal and Capacity-Wastage-Aware Washing

Abstract

Programmable Microfluidic Devices (PMDs) are revolutionizing the traditional biochemical experiments due to their flexibility of performing various functionalities on a platform without any amendment in the underlying hardware. To enhance the inherent tractability of a PMD, microchannels are frequently shared among the operations; however, this leads to cross-contamination problem due to the residues trapped on the channel. For producing safe outcomes, a flow-level synthesis minimizing contamination as well as an efficient washing strategy become immediate requisites. Moreover, each unit of wash fluid possesses a finite capacity for washing and therefore, cannot clean the entire contaminated area on a chip. Hence, capacity-aware washing scheme is the urgent requirement to fulfil the practical constraints of a flow-layer design. In this paper, a design synthesis minimizing the amount of contamination is proposed which is followed by a model for wash optimization targeting to reduce wash time and total loss of capacity, while removing all the contaminations. The efficacy of the proposed synthesis and the washing scheme has been assessed considering various baseline approaches and the existing works on the same.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-contamination
• Design automation
• Microfluidic biochips
• Optimization
• Synthesis
• Washing

Acknowledgement

The second author is with the Visvesvaraya fellowship grant for PhD under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Piyali Datta

Piyali Datta received the BSc, BTech, and MTech degrees in 2010, 2013, and 2015, respectively, from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India. She is working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India, while also pursuing her PhD degree at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Calcutta. Ms Datta’s current research interests include microfluidics, computational geometry, VLSI design, etc. Ms Datta has published more than 30 technical research articles.

Arpan Chakraborty

Arpan Chakraborty received the BSc, BTech, and MTech degrees in 2010, 2013, and 2015, respectively, from the University of Calcutta, India. He is a PhD fellow at the same University under the Visvesvaraya fellowship, MHRD, Govt. of India. His current research interests include synthesis of digital microfluidic biochips, VLSI design automation, etc. He has a number of publications in several conferences and journals. Email: [email protected]

Rajat Kumar Pal

Rajat Kumar Pal received the BE degree in electrical engineering from the Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur under the University of Calcutta, India, and the MTech degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Calcutta, India in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He received the PhD degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India in 1996. Presently, he is working as a Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Calcutta, India. He holds several international patents and his research interests include VLSI design, graph theory, logic synthesis, computational geometry, etc. Dr Pal has published more than 200 technical research articles. Email: [email protected]