Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a fabricated digital microfluidic biochip for protein stamping, which is
capable of handling transportation and mixing of protein droplets at high
concentrations. The implementation of the basic protein-droplet operations
clearly highlights the promise of a protein crystallization biochip that relies
on digital microfluidics. However, no automated chip design technique has
thus far been proposed.
1.4 Book Outline
This topic addresses a number of optimization problems related to biochip
design automation. These optimization problems are motivated by practical
considerations. Figure 1.6 shows the various design and optimization method-
ologies covered in this topic. The reminder of the topic is organized as follows.
Chapter 2 presents a defect-tolerant, routing-aware, architectural-level
synthesis methodology. Section 2.1 provides an overview of related prior
work on automated synthesis tools and postsynthesis droplet routing for a
digital microfluidic biochip. Section 2.2 introduces a new criterion for evalu-
ating droplet routability for a synthesized design and incorporates it into the
overall synthesis flow. Section 2.3 presents presynthesis and postsynthesis
defect-tolerance methods and integrates them with the droplet-routing-aware
synthesis flow. In Section 2.4, simulation for the dilution steps of a protein
assay is used to evaluate the proposed synthesis method. Finally, conclu-
sions are drawn in Section 2.5.
Chapter 3 presents three methods for pin-constrained biochip design,
namely, array partitioning, cross-referencing, and broadcast addressing.
Section 3.1 describes the partitioning and pin-assignment algorithms
for pin-constrained design of large microfluidic arrays. The proposed
array-partitioning-based method is evaluated using a set of real-life bioassays.
Section 3.2 presents an alternative pin-constrained design method based on
cross-referencing. The cross-referencing-based method is also evaluated
using a set of real-life bioassays. The third pin-constrained design method,
referred to as broadcast addressing, is presented in Section 3.3. Section 3.4
analyzes these three methods and concludes the chapter.
Efficient testing and diagnosis methods are presented in Chapter 4.
Section 4.1 relates defects in microfluidic biochips to fault models and
observable errors. In Section 4.2, the proposed parallel “scan-like” test and
defect diagnosis scheme for both online and off-line testing are introduced.
A number of physical defects for microfluidic biochips are listed and fault
models are presented. Section 4.3 determines the complexity of the test and
diagnosis procedures in terms of the number of droplet manipulation steps
required. Section 4.4 presents these results on the application of a fabricated
chip. Section 4.5 introduces the concept of functional testing and presents
