Design Automation and Test for Flow-Based Biochips: Past Successes and Future Challenges

Continuous flow-based biochips are attracting more attention from biochemical and pharmaceutical laboratories due to the efficiency and low costs of these miniaturized chips. By processing fluid volumes of nanoliter size, such chips offer the advantages of fast reaction, high throughput, high precision and minimum reagent consumption. In addition, by avoiding human intervention in the whole experiment process with automated control, these chips provide the ability of reliable large-scale experiments and diagnoses to the biochemical and pharmaceutical industry. In this paper, the fundamentals of flow-based biochips are explained. Thereafter, the state of the art of design automation for flow-based microfluidic biochips is reviewed and specific features of these chips compared to integrated circuits are discussed. These features offer extensive chances to expand the design automation methods from the IC industry to develop customized design flows and architectures for flow-based microfluidic biochips.