Fast architecture-level synthesis of fault-tolerant flow-based microfluidic biochips

Wei-Lun Huang, Ankur Gupta, Sudip Roy, Tsung-Yi Ho, Paul Pop

Abstract: Microfluidic-based lab-on-a-chips have emerged as a popular technology for implementation of different biochemical test protocols used in medical diagnostics. However, in the manufacturing process or during operation of such chips, some faults may occur that leads to damage of the chip, which in turn results in wastage of expensive reagent fluids. In order to make the chip fault-tolerant, the state-of-the-art technique adopts simulated annealing (SA) based approach to synthesize a fault-tolerant architecture. However, the SA method is time consuming and non-deterministic with over-simplified model that usually derive sub-optimal results. Thus, we propose a progressive optimization procedure for the synthesis of fault-tolerant flow-based microfluidic biochips. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed method is efficient compared to the state-of-the-art techniques and can provide effective solutions in 88% (on average) less CPU time compared to state-of-the-art technique over three benchmark bioprotocols.