The Coming of Age of Microfluidics: Connecting Algorithms and Foundations of Chip Design to Biochemistry and the Life Sciences

This seminar offers attendees an opportunity to bridge the semiconductor ICs/system industry with the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. This talk will first describe emerging applications in biology and biochemistry  that  can  benefit  from  advances  in  electronic  “biochips”.  The  presenters  will  next  describe  technology platforms for accomplishing “biochemistry on a chip”, and introduce the audience to both the droplet-­based  "digital"  microfluidics  based  on  electrowetting  actuation  and  flow-­based  “continuous”  microfluidics based on microvalve technology. Next, the presenters will describe system-­level synthesis includes  operation  scheduling  and  resource  binding  algorithms,  and  physical-­level  synthesis  includes  placement and routing optimizations. In this way, the audience will see how a “biochip compiler” can translate protocol descriptions provided by an end user (e.g., a chemist or a nurse at a doctor’s clinic) to a set of optimized and executable fluidic instructions that will run on the underlying microfluidic platform. The problem of mapping a small number of chip pins to a large number of array electrodes will also be covered. Finally, sensor feedback-­based cyberphysical adaptation will be covered.