| Abstract | Microfluidic-based biochips are soon revolutionizing clinical diagnostics and many biochemical
laboratory procedures due to their advantages of automation, cost reduction, portability, and
efficiency. The basic idea of microfluidic biochips is to integrate all necessary functions for
biochemical analysis onto one chip using microfluidics technology. These micro-total-analysis-
systems (μTAS) are more versatile and complex than microarrays. Integrated functions include
microfluidic assay operations and detection, as well as sample pre-treatment and preparation.
The first generation of microfluidic biochips contained permanently etched structures such as
pumps, valves and channels, and relied on continuous liquid flow stream to carry out specific
tasks. This type of biochips hereafter is referred to as continuous-flow microfluidics or channel-
based biochips. On the contrary, digital microfluidics, the second-generation biochip architecture,
relies on discrete liquid particles to carry out general-purpose analysis.
Continuing growth of various applications have dramatically complicated the chip/system
integration and design complexity making traditional manual designs not suitable enough
especially under the time-to-market issue. It is necessary to develop high-quality physical design
tools to relieve the design burden of manual optimization of bioassays and time-consuming chip
layout designs.
In this talk, technology platforms for accomplishing “biochemistry on a chip”, and introduce the
audience to both the droplet-based "digital" microfluidics based on electrowetting actuation and
flow-based “continuous” microfluidics based on microvalve technology will be described. Next, a
holistic perspective on physical design tools for microfluidic biochips and several associative
combinatorial and geometric optimization for placement and routing problems will be discussed.
In this way, the audience will see how a “biochip compiler” can translate protocol descriptions
provided by an end user (e.g., a chemist or a nurse at a doctor’s clinic) to a set of optimized and
executable fluidic instructions that will run on the underlying microfluidic platform. Having
these physical design tools, users and designers will be able to generate an optimized chip layout
for good fluidic performance, high reliability, and low manufacturing cost. Therefore, biochip
users and designers can concentrate on the development at application level, leaving layout
details to physical design tools. |