A top-down synthesis methodology for flow-based microfluidic biochips considering valve-switching minimization

Designs of flow-based microfluidic biochips have emerged as a popular alternative for laboratory experiments because they replace conventional biochemical paradigms on a chip. As the applications become more complicated, a flow-based microfluidic biochip requires more valves to manipulate the sample flow for the large-scale and concurrent experiments. Despite the design complexity is increased very quickly, current synthesis methodologies still use full custom and bottom-up procedures to synthesize a biochip. These manual steps are time consuming and would lead to dispensable valve-switching. According to recent studies, frequently switching the valves may reduce the reliability. To minimize the valve-switching activities, we propose a top down synthesis methodology for flow-based microfluidic biochip. We develop a set-based minimum cost maximum flow (SMCMF) resource binding algorithm and an incremental cluster expansion (ICE) placement algorithm in architecture-level and physical-level synthesis, respectively. The experimental results show that our methodology not only makes significant reduction of valve-switching amount but also diminishes the application completion time for both real-life applications and a set of synthetic benchmarks.