Modeling and Simulation Framework for Flow-Based Microfluidic Biochips

Microfluidic biochips are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers and are able to integrate the necessary functions for biochemical analysis on-chip. In this paper we are interested in flow-based biochips, in which the fluidic flow is manipulated using integrated microvalves. By combining several microvalves, more complex units, such as micropumps, switches, mixers, and multiplexers, can be built. Such biochips are becoming increasingly complex, with thousands of components, but are still designed manually using a bottom-up full-custom design approach, which is extremely labor intensive and error prone. In this paper, we present an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which addresses (i) schematic capture of the biochip architecture and biochemical application, (ii) logic simulation of an application running on a biochip, and is able to integrate the high level synthesis tasks we have developed for the top-down design of flow-based biochips. We show how the IDE can be used to design biochips for several applications.