Bachelorprojekt - Softwareteknologi
Project No. 0120:  CAD tool for the routing of microfluidic components

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Description:

Microfluidic biochips (also known as lab-on-a-chip) are an alternative to conventional biochemical laboratories, and are revolutionizing biology.

We are interested in a type of biochips where the basic building block is a very small valve. By combining these valves, more complex units (see the videos here) such as mixers, switches, multiplexers can be built up and the technology is therefore referred to as microfluidic Very Large Scale Integration (mVLSI).

These biochips are becoming increasingly complex, with thousands of components, but are designed manually, which is extremely labor intensive and error prone. Designers use drawing tools, e.g., AutoCAD, to manually design the chip.

In this project you will develop a simple CAD tool prototype for helping the designers. The CAD tools should perform the routing of fluidic channels on the biochip. The tool will take as input a diagram such as the one in Figure 4.1b on page 48 in [1], a placement of modules (the rectangles in Figure 4.2 in [1]) and output the routes (the lines connecting the rectangles in the figure).

You will have to select an existing routing algorithm (for regular integrated circuits) from the literature, and implement it. You could start by looking at Hadlock's algorithm, see Figure 8.19 in [2]. Note that you don't need to know hardware or biochips to do this project-it's about programming and algorithms. We're quite excited about Python, which is fun and easy to learn, but any programming language is fine.

You can choose if you want to write the thesis in Danish or English. The project can be done by two persons, each implementing an algorithm and then comparing. We will provide the examples to test your tool. There's no need to create a GUI. Your results could be integrated in an editor, developed as a MSc thesis at DTU. We're building a research group at DTU on this topic, and we're looking for students to be part of this.

[1] System-Level Modeling and Synthesis Techniques for Flow-Based Microfluidic Very Large Scale Integration Biochips (PDF), DTU PhD thesis (draft), 2012
[2] Naveed A. Sherwani. Algorithms for VLSI Physical Design Automation, chapter "Grid routing" (PDF)

Supervisor(s) Paul Pop, Jan Madsen

Sidst opdateret: Nov 27, 2012 af Hans Henrik Løvengreen