Digital Microfluidic Biochips:

Towards Hardware/Software Co-Design and Cyberphysical System Integration

Prof. Tsung-Yi Ho

■ Date: Aug. 28, 2014 (Thursday)

■ Time: 11:00 am

■ Place: Room 1112, Building 301

ABSTRACT

Advances in droplet-based digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) have led to the emergence of biochips for automating laboratory procedures in biochemistry and molecular biology. These devices enable the precise control of microliter of nanoliter volumes of biochemical samples and reagents. They combine electronics with biology, and integrate various bioassay operations, such as sample preparation, analysis, separation, and detection. To meet the challenges of increasing design complexity and precision, the interplay between hardware and software through sensor-based cyberphysical integration will be involved to build DMFBs effectively. This talk offers attendees an opportunity to bridge the semiconductor ICs/system industry with the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. The talk will first describe emerging applications in biology and biochemistry that can benefit from advances in electronic “biochips”. The presenter will next describe technology platforms for accomplishing “biochemistry on a chip”, and introduce the audience to microarrays and fluidic actuation methods based on microfluidics. The droplet-based "digital" microfluidic platform based on electrowetting will be described in considerable detail. Next, the presenter will describe fabrication techniques for digital microfluidic biochips, followed by computer-aided design, design-for-testability, cyberphysical integration, and reconfiguration aspects of chip/system design. Synthesis algorithms and methods will be presented to map behavioral descriptions to a digital microfluidic platform, and generate an optimized schedule of bioassay operations, chip layout, and droplet-flow paths. In this way, the audience will see how a “biochip compiler” can translate protocol descriptions provided by an end user (e.g., a chemist or a nurse at a doctor’s clinic) to a set of optimized and executable fluidic instructions that will run on the underlying digital microfluidic platform.

BIOGRAPHY

Prof. Tsung-Yi Ho received his Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC, in 2005. He is a Professor with the Department of Computer Science of National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. From 2007 to 2014, he was with National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. His research interests include design automation for microfluidic biochips and nanometer integrated circuits. He has published several papers in top journals and conferences such as IEEE TCAD, ACM TODAES, ACM/IEEE DAC, IEEE/ACM ICCAD, ACM ISPD, and etc. He presented 8 tutorials and contributed 4 special sessions in ACM/IEEE conferences, all in design automations on biochips. He was the recipient of many research awards, such as Dr. Wu Ta-You Memorial Award of National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan, Junior Research Investigators Award of Academia Sinica, Distinguished Young Scholar Award of Taiwan IC Design Society, Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer Award of Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering, K. T. Li Research Award of Delta Electronics, ACM Taipei Chapter Young Researcher Award, IEEE Tainan Chapter Gold Member Award, the Invitational Fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan, and the Humboldt Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany. Currently, he serves as a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society, the Chair of IEEE Computer Society Tainan Chapter, and an Associate Editor of ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems and IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems. He is a senior member of IEEE.

Contact: 02-880-6768, kchoi@snu.ac.kr (Prof. Kiyoung Choi)