Timing-Driven Flow-Channel Network Construction for Continuous-Flow Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

The emergence of flow-based microfluidic biochips (FBMBs) has increased the automation level of biochemical procedures, and these lab-on-a-chip devices are now being used for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, point-of-care diagnosis, etc. As fabrication technology advances, the feature size of FBMBs keeps shrinking, thereby introducing a series of knotty challenges to the physical design of FBMBs. In particular, timing-sensitive bioassays, such as forensic DNA typing and chromatin immunoprecipitation, require a highly accurate time-control of fluids within a limited completion time. However, existing work does not consider the real-time requirements of these bioassays. In this paper, we formulate the first practical timing-driven flow-channel network construction problem for FBMBs and present a performance-driven placement and routing algorithm for solving this problem. Given the design specifications of a biochip and its biochemistry application, our goal is to construct a high-quality flow-channel network with minimized timing delay and total cost. The experimental results on 14 benchmarks confirm that our algorithm leads to better timing behavior and lower chip cost.