Boston University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 8 Saint Mary's St., Boston, USA.
Lab Chip. 2016 Jul 5;16(14):2730-41. doi: 10.1039/c6lc00477f.
Microfluidic devices, by definition, are required to move liquids from one physical location to another. Given a finite and frequently fixed set of physical channels to route fluids, a primitive design element that allows reconfigurable routing of that fluid from any of n input ports to any n output ports will dramatically change the paradigms by which these chips are designed and applied. Furthermore, if these elements are "regular" regarding their design, the programming and fabrication of these elements becomes scalable. This paper presents such a design element called a transposer. We illustrate the design, fabrication and operation of a single transposer. We then scale this design to create a programmable fabric towards a general-purpose, reconfigurable microfluidic platform analogous to the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) found in digital electronics.
微流控装置的定义要求将液体从一个物理位置移动到另一个位置。给定一组有限且经常固定的物理通道来输送流体，一个允许从任何 n 个输入端口重新配置地将流体路由到任何 n 个输出端口的基本设计元素将极大地改变设计和应用这些芯片的模式。此外，如果这些元素在设计上是“规则”的，那么这些元素的编程和制造就具有可扩展性。本文提出了一种这样的设计元素，称为转置器。我们说明了单个转置器的设计、制造和操作。然后，我们将此设计扩展为可编程结构，以创建类似于数字电子中的现场可编程门阵列 (FPGA) 的通用、可重构微流控平台。
