Design Automation for Dilution of a Fluid Using Programmable Microfluidic Device--Based Biochips

Microfluidic lab-on-a-chip has emerged as a new technology for implementing biochemical protocols on small-sized portable devices targeting low-cost medical diagnostics. Among various efforts of fabrication of such chips, a relatively new technology is a programmable microfluidic device (PMD) for implementation of flow-based lab-on-a-chip. A PMD chip is suitable for automation due to its symmetric nature. In order to implement a bioprotocol on such a reconfigurable device, it is crucial to automate a sample preparation on-chip as well. In this article, we propose a dilution PMD algorithm (namely DPMD) and its architectural mapping scheme (namely generalized architectural mapping algorithm (GAMA)) for addressing fluidic cells of such a device to perform dilution of a reagent fluid on-chip. We used an optimization function that first minimizes the number of mixing steps and then reduces the waste generation and further reagent requirement. Simulation results show that the proposed DPMD scheme is comparative to the existing state-of-the-art dilution algorithm. The proposed design automation using the architectural mapping scheme reduces the required chip area and, hence, minimizes the valve switching that, in turn, increases the life span of the PMD-chip.