An efficient fault-tolerant valve-based microfluidic routing fabric for single-cell analysis

Abstract

Single-cell analysis is used to gain insights into diseases such as cancer. Recently, a hybrid microfluidic platform was proposed for concurrent single-cell analysis on thousands of heterogeneous cells. In this design, barcoding droplets are routed using a valve-based routing fabric to label the input cells. The fault-tolerance of this routing fabric has also been studied and a design technique for implementing a fault-tolerant crossbar has been proposed. However, prior work leads to a significant increase in fabric size and a decrease in cell-analysis performance. We address the above drawbacks and introduce a low-overhead design technique for achieving fault-tolerance, while maintaining the efficiency of the cell-analysis platform. We show that the proposed method is optimal in that it minimizes the overhead in terms of fabric size. We also show that the new design outperforms the previous solution in terms of cell-analysis performance.