SOLAR: Simultaneous optimization of control-layer pins placement and channel routing in flow-based microfluidic biochips

The lab-on-a-chip (LOC) has attracted much attention recently as the advances in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). The applications of lab-on-a-chip devices include point-of-care disease diagnostics, medicine analysis, and drugs discovery. The flow-based microfluidic biochip has been adopted to implement lab-on-chips. However, the flow-based microfluidic biochips are usually designed manually due to the lack of computer-aided design tools. Manual design procedures are time consuming and make the developments less efficient. Furthermore, there may be human negligence as the designs become more complicated. In this paper, we propose a systematic methodology on control-layer design of flow-based microfluidic biochips. Optimized solutions can be found efficiently through the proposed design procedure.