Digital Microfluidics: Connecting Biochemistry to Computer-Aided Design

ABSTRACT

Digital microfluidics enables the precise control and manipulation of
droplets of nanoliter volumes on miniaturized electronic platforms
referred to as biochips. Digital microfluidic biochips are revolutionizing
laboratory procedures for enzymatic analysis, DNA sequencing, proteomic
analysis involving proteins and peptides, immunoassays, and environmental
toxicity monitoring. Another emerging application area for microfluidic
biochips is clinical diagnostics, especially the immediate point-of-care
diagnosis of diseases.

This talk will first provide an overview of digital microfluidics,
demonstrate basic microfluidic operations, and describe some prototype
devices that have been fabricated. Next, the talk will describe early work
on computer-aided design tools that allow the automated design of biochips
from high-level protocol descriptions. These include synthesis tools that
can map behavioral descriptions to a droplet-based microfluidic biochip
and generate an optimized schedule of bioassay operations, the binding of
assay operations to functional units, and the layout and droplet
flow-paths for the biochip. Cost-effective testing techniques will be
presented to detect faults after manufacture and during field operation.
It will be shown how on-line and off-line reconfiguration techniques can
be used to easily bypass faults once they are detected. Thus the biochip
user can concentrate on the development of the nano- and micro-scale
bioassays, leaving implementation details to design automation tools.

KRISHNENDU CHAKRABARTY

Krishnendu Chakrabarty received the B. Tech. degree from the Indian
Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1990, and the M.S.E. and Ph.D.
degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1992 and 1995,
respectively, all in Computer Science and Engineering. He is now Professor
of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Dr. Chakrabarty
is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Faculty (CAREER)
award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award, the Humboldt
Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany,
and several best papers awards at IEEE conferences. His current research
projects include: testing of system-on-chip integrated circuits;
microfluidic biochips; microfluidics-based chip cooling; wireless sensor
networks. He has co-authored seven books on these topics, and published
over 240 papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings.

Prof. Chakrabarty is a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society
for 2006-2007 and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and
Systems Society for 2006-2007. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE
Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems,
IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and
System I, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, and ACM
Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems. He is an Editor of
IEEE Design & Test of Computers and of the Journal of Electronic Testing:
Theory and Applications (JETTA). Prof. Chakrabarty is a senior member of
IEEE, a senior member of ACM, and a member of Sigma Xi.