Transport or Store? Synthesizing Flow-based Microfluidic Biochips using Distributed Channel Storage

Flow-based microfluidic biochips have attracted much attention in the EDA community due to their miniaturized size and execution efficiency. Previous research, however, still follows the traditional computing model with a dedicated storage unit, which actually becomes a bottleneck of the performance of biochips. In this paper, we propose the first architectural synthesis framework considering distributed storage constructed temporarily from transportation channels to cache fluid samples. Since distributed storage can be accessed more efficiently than a dedicated storage unit and channels can switch between the roles of transportation and storage easily, biochips with this distributed computing architecture can achieve a higher execution efficiency even with fewer resources. Experimental results confirm that the execution efficiency of a bioassay can be improved by up to 28% while the number of valves in the biochip can be reduced effectively.