An Integrated Co-Design of Flow-Based Biochips Considering Flow-Control Design Issues and Objectives

Abstract

With increasing effectiveness of flow-based microfluidic biochips in the field of biochemical experiments and point-of-care diagnosis, design automation demands enormous attention to integrate the flow-layer design and control-layer design instead of considering them in isolation. Some severe design issues like valve reliability, control-channel delay, pressure skew, etc. are obvious and they must be tactfully dealt along with minimization of several cost-driving issues like schedule length, pin count, and control-channel length while ensuring planarity of the flow-layer components as well as control-layer channel routes. Hence, this paper aims to propose a unified flow-control co-design methodology considering various flow-control cost-driving issues while reducing the design cycles to obtain a low-cost and efficient platform. The performance is evaluated over several benchmark bioassays that show the efficacy of the proposed co-design method which reduces the number of required valves by 30%, control-channel length by 48.5%, and number of flow-channel crossings by 72.2% than the existing works, on an average.

KEYWORDS:

• Automation
• Co-design
• Design optimization
• Microfluidics
• Synthesis

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. Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

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. 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]