Pan Youlin, Xu Yanbo, Chen Ziyang, Huang Xing, Liu Genggeng
College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350116, China.
Engineering Research Center of Big Data Intelligence, Ministry of Education, Fuzhou 350116, China.
Micromachines (Basel). 2025 May 14;16(5):577. doi: 10.3390/mi16050577.
Continuous-flow microfluidic biochips (CFMBs) automatically execute various bioassays by precisely controlling the transport of fluid samples, which is driven by pressure delivered through fluidic ports. High-level synthesis, as an important stage in the design flow of CFMBs, generates binding and scheduling solutions whose quality directly affects the efficiency of the execution of bioassays. Existing high-level synthesis methods perform numerous transport tasks concurrently to increase efficiency. However, fluidic ports cannot be shared between concurrently executing transport tasks, resulting in a large number of fluidic ports introduced by existing methods. Increasing the number of fluidic ports undermines the integration, reduces the reliability, and increases the manufacturing cost. In this paper, we propose a port-driven high-level synthesis method based on integer linear programming (ILP) called SlimPort, integrating the optimization of fluidic port number into high-level synthesis, which has never been considered in prior work. Meanwhile, to ensure bioassay correctness, volume management between devices with a non-fixed input/output ratio is realized. Additionally, two acceleration strategies for ILP, scheduling constraint reduction and upper boundary estimation of fluidic port number, are proposed to improve the efficiency of SlimPort. Experimental results from multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SlimPort leads to high assay execution efficiency and a low number of fluidic ports.
连续流微流控生物芯片（CFMBs）通过精确控制流体样本的传输来自动执行各种生物测定，流体样本的传输由通过流体端口施加的压力驱动。高级综合作为CFMBs设计流程中的一个重要阶段，生成绑定和调度解决方案，其质量直接影响生物测定执行的效率。现有的高级综合方法通过并发执行大量传输任务来提高效率。然而，在并发执行的传输任务之间不能共享流体端口，这导致现有方法引入了大量流体端口。增加流体端口数量会破坏集成度、降低可靠性并增加制造成本。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于整数线性规划（ILP）的端口驱动高级综合方法，称为SlimPort，将流体端口数量的优化集成到高级综合中，这在先前的工作中从未被考虑过。同时，为确保生物测定的正确性，实现了具有非固定输入/输出比的设备之间的体积管理。此外，还提出了两种用于ILP的加速策略，即调度约束减少和流体端口数量的上限估计，以提高SlimPort的效率。多个基准测试的实验结果表明，SlimPort可实现较高的测定执行效率和较少的流体端口数量。
