Papers Published

1. Su, F; Chakrabarty, K, Module placement for fault-tolerant microfluidics-based biochips, Acm Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, vol. 11 no. 3 (September, 2006), pp. 682-710, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) [doi] .
   (last updated on 2022/12/30)

   Abstract:
   Microfluidics-based biochips are soon expected to revolutionize clinical diagnosis, DNA sequencing, and other laboratory procedures involving molecular biology. Most microfluidic biochips today are based on the principle of continuous fluid flow and they rely on permanently etched microchannels, micropumps, and microvalves. We focus here on the automated design of "digital" droplet-based microfluidic biochips. In contrast to conventional continuous-flow systems, digital microfluidics offers dynamic reconfigurability; groups of cells in a microfluidics array can be reconfigured to change their functionality during the concurrent execution of a set of bioassays. We present a simulated annealing-based technique for module placement in such biochips. The placement procedure not only addresses chip area, but also considers fault tolerance, which allows a microfluidic module to be relocated elsewhere in the system when a single cell is detected to be faulty. Simulation results are presented for case studies involving the polymerase chain reaction and multiplexed in vitro clinical diagnostics. © 2006 ACM.