Computer-aided design for microfluidic chips based on multilayer soft lithography

Abstract

Microfluidic chips are emerging as a powerful platform for automating biology experiments. As it becomes possible to integrate tens of thousands of components on a single chip, researchers will require design automation tools to push the scale and complexity of their designs to match the capabilities of the substrate. However, to date such tools have focused only on droplet-based devices, leaving out the popular class of chips that are based on multilayer soft lithography. In this paper, we develop design automation techniques for microfluidic chips based on multilayer soft lithography. We focus our attention on the control layer, which is driven by pressure actuators to invoke the desired flows on chip. We present a language in which designers can specify the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of a microfluidic device. Given an ISA, we automatically infer the locations of valves needed to implement the ISA. We also present novel algorithms for minimizing the number of control lines needed to drive the valves, as well as for routing valves to control ports while admitting sharing between the control lines. To the microfluidic community, we offer a free computer-aided design tool, Micado, which implements a subset of our algorithms as a practical plug-in to AutoCAD. Micado is being used successfully by microfluidic designers. We demonstrate its performance on three realistic chips.