Specification, Integration, and Benchmarking of Continuous Flow Microfluidic Devices: Invited Paper

Abstract

The lack of standardization in the specification and representation of microfluidic designs and their corresponding architectures is one of the largest hurdles faced by the developers of Microfluidic Design Automation (MDA) tools. In this paper, we introduce MINT, a Microfluidic Hardware Description Language (MHDL) for defining components and devices in a human readable manner, and ParchMint, an MDA interchange format and associated benchmark suite that can be used to compare the performance of different physical design algorithms. We further demonstrate how the introduction of MINT and ParchMint into the engineering workflow can bridge the gaps from the specification to the fabrication of microfluidic devices. While recent efforts to democratize microfluidics have been recognized by the community, there is an unfortunate lack of open source tools, design languages, and standards. Consequently, microfluidic designs shared on open platforms such as Metafluidics[15] leave conceptual gaps in terms of missing design information that are necessary to realize the “creative process flows” (Reproduce, Remix, and Test multiple systems). MINT and ParchMint are open source projects, which allows the community to contribute and extend their functionality to enable advanced algorithmic methodologies and new commercialization possibilities that differ from the vertically integrated industries we see today.