Contamination-Free Switch Design and Synthesis for Microfluidic Large-Scale Integration
Duan Shena, Yushen Zhangb, Mengchu Lic, Tsun-Ming Tsengd, and Ulf Schlichtmanne
Chair of Electronic Design Automation, Technical University of Munich, Arcisstrasse 21, D-80333 Munich, Germany
aduan.shen@tum.de
byushen.zhang@tum.de
cmengchu.li@tum.de
dtsun-ming.tseng@tum.de
eulf.schlichtmann@tum.de
ABSTRACT
Microfluidic large-scale integration (mLSI) biochips have developed rapidly in recent decades. The gap between design efficiency and application complexity has led to a growing interest in mLSI design automation. The state-of-the-art design automation tools for mLSI focus on the simultaneous cooptimisation of the flow and control layers but neglect potential contamination between different fluid reagents and products. Microfluidic switches, as fluid routers at the intersection of flow paths, are especially prone to contamination. State-of-the-art tools design the switches as spines with junctions, which aggregate the contamination problem. In this work, we present a contaminationfree microfluidic switch design and a synthesis method to generate application-specific switches that can be employed by physical design tools for mLSI. We also propose a scheduling and binding method to transport the fluids with least time and fewest resources. To reduce the number of pressure inlets, we consider pressure sharing between valves within the switch. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods show advantages in avoiding contamination and improving transportation efficiency over conventional methods.
Keywords: Microfluidic Large-Scale Integration, Design Automation, Quadratic Linear Programming, Contamination.
