Physical-level synthesis for digital lab-on-a-chip considering variation, contamination, and defect

Area of Science:

• Microfluidics
• Biochemical Analysis
• Computer-Aided Design (CAD)

Background:

• Microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices are crucial for biochemical analysis and health studies, offering accuracy, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
• Increasing design complexity necessitates advanced computer-aided design (CAD) methodologies over manual approaches.
• Physical-level synthesis, including placement and routing, is a critical component of lab-on-a-chip CAD.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a physical-level synthesis flow for lab-on-a-chip design that concurrently addresses variation, contamination, and defects.
• To integrate a maze routing-based, variation, contamination, and defect-aware droplet routing technique with existing placement methods.
• To achieve co-optimization of placement and routing for enhanced robustness in lab-on-a-chip systems.

Main Methods:

• A novel maze routing algorithm was developed to account for variations, contamination, and defects during droplet routing.
• This routing technique was seamlessly integrated into an established placement methodology.
• The approach focused on co-optimization of placement and routing to mitigate design flaws.

Main Results:

• The proposed technique successfully avoided the use of defective or contaminated grids, unlike conventional methods that utilized 17.0% on average.
• The variation-aware routing significantly improved average routing yield by 51.2%.
• This improvement was achieved with a minimal 3.5% increase in overall completion time.

Conclusions:

• The developed physical-level synthesis flow effectively handles variations, contamination, and defects in lab-on-a-chip designs.
• The integrated placement and routing co-optimization significantly enhances device reliability and yield.
• This approach represents a substantial advancement in the computer-aided design of complex microfluidic systems.