Computer-aided design for multilayer microfluidic chips

Abstract

Microfluidic chips fabricated by multilayer soft lithography are emerging as "lab-on-a-chip" systems that can automate biological experiments. As we are able to build more complex microfluidic chips with thousands of components, it becomes possible to build devices which can be programmatically changed to solve multiple problems. However, the current design methodology does not scale. In this thesis, we introduce design automation techniques to multilayer soft lithography microfluidics. Our work focuses on automating the design of the control layer. We present a method to define an Instruction Set Architecture as a hierarchical composition of flows. From this specification, we automatically infer and generate the logic and signals to control the chip. To complete the design automation of the control layer, we suggest a routing algorithm to connect control channels to peripheral I/O ports. To the microfluidic community, we offer a free computer-aided design tool, Micado, which implements our ideas for automation in a practical plug-in to AutoCAD. We have evaluated our work on real chips and our tool has been used successfully by microfluidic designers.