Transport-Free Module Binding for Sample Preparation using Microfluidic Fully Programmable Valve Arrays
Gautam Choudhary1,2, Sandeep Pal2, Debraj Kundu2, Sukanta Bhattacharjee3, Shigeru Yamashita4, Bing Li5, Ulf Schlichtmann5 and Sudip Roy2
1Adobe Research, India
2CoDA Laboratory, IIT Roorkee, India
3Dept. of CSE, IIT Guwahati, India
4CISE, Ritsumeikan University, Japan,
5Chair of EDA, Technical University of Munich, Germany
ABSTRACT
Microfluidic fully programmable valve array (FPVA) biochips have emerged as general-purpose flow-based microfluidic lab-on-chips (LoCs). An FPVA supports highly re-configurable on-chip components (modules) in the twodimensional grid-like structure controlled by some software programs, unlike application-specific flow-based LoCs. Fluids can be loaded into or washed from a cell with the help of flows from the inlet to outlet of an FPVA, whereas cell-to-cell transportation of discrete fluid segment(s) is not precisely possible. The simplest mixing module to realize on an FPVA-based LoC is a four-way mixer consisting of a 2×2 array of cells working as a ring-like mixer having four valves. In this paper, we propose a design automation method for sample preparation that finds suitable placements of mixing operations of a mixing tree using four-way mixers without requiring any transportation of fluid(s) between modules. We also propose a heuristic that modifies the mixing tree to reduce the sample preparation time. We have performed an extensive simulation and examined several parameters to determine the performance of the proposed solution.
