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Abstract:
Continuous-flow microfluidic biochips have attracted high research interest over the past years. Inside such a chip, fluid samples of milliliter volumes are efficiently transported between devices (e.g., mixers, heaters, etc.) to automatically perform various laboratory procedures in biology and biochemistry. Each transportation task, however, requires an exclusive flow path composed of multiple contiguous microchannels during its execution period. Excess/waste fluids, in the meantime, should be discarded by independent flow paths connected to waste ports. All these paths are etched in a very tiny chip area using multilayer soft lithography and driven by flow ports connecting with external pressure sources, forming a highly integrated chip architecture that determines the final performance of biochips. In this article, we propose a new and practical design flow called PathDriver+ (PD+) for the architecture design of microfluidic biochips, integrating the actual fluid manipulations into both high-level synthesis and physical design, which has never been considered in prior work. With this design flow, highly efficient chip architectures with a flow-path network that enables the actual fluid transportation and removal can be constructed automatically. Meanwhile, fluid volume management between devices and flow-path minimization are realized for the first time, thus, ensuring the correctness of assay outcomes while reducing the complexity of chip architectures. Additionally, diagonal channel routing is implemented to fundamentally improve the chip performance. The tradeoff between the numbers of channel intersections and fluidic ports is evaluated to further reduce the fabrication cost of biochips. The experimental results on multiple benchmarks confirm that the proposed design flow leads to high assay execution efficiency and low overall chip cost.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS
ISSN: 0278-0070
Year: 2022
Issue: 7
Volume: 41
Page: 2185-2198
2 . 9
JCR@2022
2 . 7 0 0
JCR@2023
ESI Discipline: ENGINEERING;
ESI HC Threshold:66
JCR Journal Grade:2
CAS Journal Grade:3
Cited Count:
WoS CC Cited Count: 11
SCOPUS Cited Count: 16
ESI Highly Cited Papers on the List: 0 Unfold All
WanFang Cited Count:
Chinese Cited Count:
30 Days PV: 2
Affiliated Colleges: