A network-flow based valve-switching aware binding algorithm for flow-based microfluidic biochips

Designs of flow-based microfluidic biochips are receiving much attention recently because they replace conventional biological automation paradigm and are able to integrate different biochemical analysis functions on a chip. However, as the design complexity increases, a flow-based microfluidic biochip needs more chip-integrated micro-valves, i.e., the basic unit of fluid-handling functionality, to manipulate the fluid flow for biochemical applications. Moreover, frequent switching of micro-valves results in decreased reliability. To minimize the valve-switching activities, we develop a network-flow based resource binding algorithm based on breadth-first search (BFS) and minimum cost maximum flow (MCMF) in architectural-level synthesis. The experimental results show that our methodology not only makes significant reduction of valve-switching activities but also diminishes the application completion time for both real-life applications and a set of synthetic benchmarks.