Synterface

Abstract

Flow-based microfluidic biochips can be used to perform bioassays by manipulating a large number of on-chip valves. These biochips are increasingly used today for biomolecular recognition, single-cell screening, and point-of-care disease diagnostics, and design-automation solutions for flow-based microfluidics enable the mapping and optimization of bimolecular protocols and software-based valve control. However, a key problem that has not received adequate attention is chip-to-world interfacing, which requires the use of off-chip control equipment to provide control signals for the on-chip valves. This problem is exacerbated by the increase in the number of valves as chips get more complex. To address the interfacing problem, we present an efficient pin-count minimization (synthesis) problem, referred to as Synterface, which uses on-chip microfluidic logic gates and optimization based on concepts from linear algebra. We present results to show that Synterface significantly reduces pin-count and simplifies the external interface for flow-based microfluidics.