An Integrated Co-Design of Flow-Based Biochips Considering Flow-Control Design Issues and Objectives

With increasing effectiveness of flow-based microfluidic biochips in the field of biochemical experiments and point-of-care diagnosis, design automation demands enormous attention to integrate the flow-layer design and control-layer design instead of considering them in isolation. Some severe design issues like valve reliability, control-channel delay, pressure skew, etc. are obvious and they must be tactfully dealt along with minimization of several cost-driving issues like schedule length, pin count, and control-channel length while ensuring planarity of the flow-layer components as well as control-layer channel routes. Hence, this paper aims to propose a unified flow-control co-design methodology considering various flow-control cost-driving issues while reducing the design cycles to obtain a low-cost and efficient platform. The performance is evaluated over several benchmark bioassays that show the efficacy of the proposed co-design method which reduces the number of required valves by 30%, control-channel length by 48.5%, and number of flow-channel crossings by 72.2% than the existing works, on an average.