Architecture Synthesis for Cost-Constrained Fault-Tolerant Flow-based Biochips

In this paper, we are interested in the synthesis of fault-tolerant architectures for flow-based microfluidic biochips, which use microvalves and channels to run biochemical applications. The growth rate of device integration in flow-based microfluidic biochips is scaling faster than Moore's law. This increase in fabrication complexity has led to an increase in defect rates during the manufacturing, thereby motivating the need to improve the yield, by designing these biochips such that they are fault tolerant. We propose an approach based on a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) for the synthesis of fault-tolerant biochip architectures. Our approach optimizes the introduction of redundancy within a given unit cost budget, such that, the biochemical application can successfully complete its execution within its deadline, even in the presence of faults, and the yield is maximized. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated using several benchmarks and compared to the results of a Simulated Annealing metaheuristic.