Title
Multicontrol: Advanced Control-Logic Synthesis for Flow-Based Microfluidic Biochips
Abstract
Flow-based microfluidic biochips are one of the most promising platforms used in biochemical and pharmaceutical laboratories due to their high efficiency and low costs. Inside such a chip, fluids of nanoliter volumes are transported between devices for various operations, such as mixing and detection. The transportation channels and corresponding operation devices are controlled by microvalves driven by external pressure sources. Since assigning an independent pressure source to every microvalve would be impractical due to high costs and limited system dimensions, states of microvalves are switched by a control logic using time multiplexing. Existing control-logic designs, however, still switch only a single control channel per operation, leading to a low efficiency. In this article, we present the first automatic synthesis approach for a control logic that is able to switch multiple control channels simultaneously. Moreover, we propose the first fault-aware design in control logic by introducing backup control paths to maintain the correct function even when manufacturing defects occur. The construction of control logic is achieved by a highly efficient framework based on particle swarm optimization, Boolean logic simplification, grid routing, together with mixing multiplexing. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed multichannel switching mechanism leads to fewer valve-switching times and lower total logic cost, while realizing fault tolerance for all control channels.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TCAD.2019.2940688
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Valves,Biochips,Switches,Multiplexing,Logic design,Fault tolerance
Journal
39
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
0278-0070
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ying Zhu140.75
Xing Huang2417.17
Bing Li317233.77
Tsung-Yi Ho45921.63
Qin Wang5172.50
Hailong Yao626739.56
Robert Wille71801194.52
Ulf Schlichtmann810921.56