MultiControl: Advanced Control Logic Synthesis for Flow-Based Microfluidic Biochips
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
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 paper, 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. Simulation
results demonstrate that the proposed multi-channel switching
mechanism leads to fewer valve-switching times and lower total
logic cost, while realizing fault tolerance for all control channels.
Sprache der Kurzfassung:
Englisch
Journal:
IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
Forschungs-