Softwareteknologi DTU - Project No. 0197:  High-Level design tool development for microfluidic biochips
Danmarks Tekniske Universitet DTU
Bachelorprojekt - Softwareteknologi
Project No. 0197:  High-Level design tool development for microfluidic biochips
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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 High-Level design tool, capable of interfacing with other development tools, as well as providing a GUI allowing the user to design new architectures and applications from scratch, or edit existing ones. This project offers a wide range of topics to focus on, such as the architecture design on a high level, called a "Netlist" [1, Sect. 4.1 and Fig. 4.1b], architecture design on a hardware-level [1, Fig. 4.2], application design as an äpplication graph" [1, Fig. 4.1], scheduling of an application onto an architecture [1, Fig. 4.3] and several more. Note that you don't need to know about the hardware or biochips out front for this project, as its main focus is on GUI programming and algorithms.

This project can also be done by two persons due to the large number of individual components that can be implemented. You can choose if you want to write the thesis in Danish or English. We will provide the examples to test your tool. We're building a research group at DTU on this topic, and we're looking for students to be part of this.

[1] Wajid Hassan Minhass, System-Level Modeling and Synthesis Techniques for Flow-Based Microfluidic Very Large Scale Integration Biochips (pdf), DTU PhD thesis, 2012

Supervisor(s) Jan Madsen

Sidst opdateret: Nov 18, 2020 af Hans Henrik Løvengreen