Biochips: The integrated circuit of biology

Microfluidic biochips integrate different biochemical analysis functionalities (e.g., dispensers, filters, mixers, separators, detectors) on-chip, miniaturizing the macroscopic chemical and biological processes often processed by lab-robots, to a sub-millimeter scale. These microsystems offer several advantages over the conventional biochemical analyzers, e.g., reduced sample and reagent volumes, speeded up biochemical reactions, ultra-sensitive detection and higher system throughput, with several assays being integrated on the same chip. Hence, microfluidic biochips are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers, and are able to integrate on-chip all the necessary functions for biochemical analysis. Microfluidic biochips have an immense potential in multiple application areas, such as clinical diagnostics, advanced sequencing, drug discovery, and environmental monitoring, to name a few. Consequently, over the last decade, biochips have received significant attention both in academia and industry. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors 2011 has listed “Medical” as a “Market Driver” for the future, and many companies related to biochips have already emerged in recent years and have reported significant profits. There are several types of microfluidic biochips, each having advantages and limitations. In flow-based biochips the microfluidic channel circuitry on the chip is equipped with chip-integrated micro-valves that are used to manipulate the on-chip fluid flow. By combining several micro-valves, more complex units like mixers, micro-pumps, multiplexers etc. can be built up, with thousands of units being accommodated on a single chip. In droplet-based biochips, the liquid is manipulated as discrete droplets on an electrode array. Although biochips are becoming more complex everyday, Computer-Aided Design(CAD) tools for these chips are still in their infancy. Most CAD research has been focused on device-level physical modeling of components. Designers are using full-custom and bottom-up methodologies involving many manual steps to implement these chips. However, for both types of biochip, the synthesis process can be similar to that of the mapping process for multi-core microelectronic platforms, i.e., starting from a biochemical application and a given biochip architecture, determining the resource allocation, binding, scheduling and placement of the application operations. This talk will illustrate how techniques and methods from multi-core microelectronic platforms can be used to solve synthesis and optimization problems of biochips.