Microfluidics-based biochips are soon expected to revolutionize laboratory procedures involving molecular biology. Advances in microfluidics technology offer exciting possibilities in the realm of enzymatic analysis, DNA analysis, proteomic analysis involving proteins and peptides, immuno-assays, and environmental toxicity monitoring. Another emerging application area for microfluidics-based biochips is clinical diagnostics, especially the immediate point-of-care diagnosis of diseases.

As the use of microfluidics-based biochips increases, their complexity is expected to become significant due to the need for multiple and concurrent assays on the chip. There is a need to deliver the same level of computer-aided design (CAD) support to the biochip designer that the semiconductor industry now takes for granted. These CAD tools will allow designers to harness the new technology that is rapidly emerging for integrated biofluidics. The 2003 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors identifies the integration of electrochemical and electro-biological techniques as one of the system-level design challenges that will be faced beyond 2009, when feature sizes shrink below 50 nm.

This talk will present early work on CAD tools that allow biochip users to describe bioassays at a sufficiently high level of abstraction. The talk will describe 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 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 Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Dr Chakrabarty is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Faculty (CAREER) award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award.

His current research projects include: design and testing of system-on-chip integrated circuits; embedded real-time systems; distributed sensor networks; design automation of microfluidics-based biochips; microfluidics-based chip cooling. Dr Chakrabarty is a co-author of two books: Microelectrofluidic Systems: Modeling and Simulation (CRC Press, 2002) and Test Resource Partitioning for System-on-a-Chip (Kluwer, 2002), and the editor of SOC (System-on-a-Chip) Testing for Plug and Play Test Automation (Kluwer 2002). He is also a co-author of the forthcoming book Scalable Infrastructure for Distributed Sensor Networks (Springer-London). He has published 200 papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings, and he holds a US patent in built-in self-test. He is a recipient of best paper awards at the 2005 International Conference on Computer Design and the 2001 IEEE Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference. He is also a recipient of the Humboldt Research Fellowship, awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.