Design and Test of Microfluidic Biochips

Microfluidics-based biochips are revolutionizing laboratory procedures involving molecular biology. Advances in microfluidics technology offer exciting possibilities for high-throughput DNA sequencing analysis, protein crystallization, drug discovery, immunoassays, and environmental toxicity monitoring. Another emerging application area for microfluidics-based biochips is clinical diagnostics, especially the immediate point-of-care diagnosis of diseases. Defect tolerance is a key requirement for biochips that are used for healthcare and environmental monitoring. There is a need to deliver the same level of computer-aided design (CAD) support to the biochip designer that the semiconductor industry now takes for granted. These CAD tools will allow designers to harness the new technology that is rapidly emerging for integrated biofluidics. This talk will present early work on design and test techniques for microfluidic biochips. The speaker will describe synthesis tools that can map behavioral descriptions to a droplet-based microfluidic biochip and generate an optimized schedule of bioassay operations, the binding of assay operations to functional units, and the layout and droplet flow-paths for the biochip. Cost-effective testing techniques will be presented to detect faults after manufacture and during field operation. It will be shown how on-line and off-line reconfiguration techniques can be used to easily bypass faults once they are detected. Thus the biochip user can concentrate on the development of the nano-and micro-scale bioassays, leaving implementation details to design automation tools.