Diagonal Component Expansion for Flow-Layer Placement of Flow-Based Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Continuous flow-based microfluidic devices have seen a huge increase in interest because of their ability to automate and miniaturize biochemistry and biological processes, as well as their promise of creating a programmable platform for chemical and biological experimentation. The major hurdle in the adoption of these types of devices is in the design, which is largely done by hand using tools such as AutoCAD or SolidWorks, which require immense domain knowledge and are hard to scale. This paper investigates the problem of automated physical design for continuous flow-based microfluidic very large scale integration (mVLSI) biochips, starting from a netlist specification of the flow layer. After an initial planar graph embedding, vertices in the netlist are expanded into two-dimensional components, followed by fluid channel routing. A new heuristic, DIagonal Component Expansion (DICE) is introduced for the component expansion step. Compared to a baseline expansion method, DICE improves area utilization by a factor of 8.90x and reduces average fluid routing channel length by 47.4%.