provides an excellent overview of the various design automation tools developed in the field.Īdditionally, current CAD tools and vector editors do not capture any information about the topology of the microfluidic device. Hence, the potential benefits of introducing domain specific Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools have motivated researchers to develop design automation tools for microfluidic engineering. The formalization of the engineering process and the development of EDA tools have, in turn, affected the entire electronics and technology industry resulting in the significant proliferation of electronic devices. Without the availability of these tools, modern-day electronics would not exist. In electronics, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools take on the bulk of the labor-intensive design tasks.
MODERN DIGITIZING DEVICE COMPATIBLE WITH AUTOCAD 2005 SOFTWARE
Despite being sophisticated software tools, both the vector editors and general purpose CAD tools place the burden of engineering the device for manufacturing and runtime design onto the user. System Designers, on the other hand, value the ability to manage multilayered designs and perform rapid iterations efficiently. For Component Designers, the ability to carefully draft complex parametric geometries and visualize 2D/3D projections of the device is essential. The designer’s need to organize geometries patterned at different depths drives the usage of these tools. While many System Designers use Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools like Solidworks and AutoCAD, a sizable portion of researchers use vector design tools like Adobe Illustrator to draw the layouts of large multilayered designs manually. System Designers consist of researchers who design large scale systems with tens to thousands of geometric features. Component Designers consist of researchers who engineer new components that take advantage of fluid mechanical phenomena.
Even in research areas where microfluidic devices have the potential to address numerous challenges in biological computation, primarily when used as the platform on which synthetic biological systems can be specified, designed, built, and tested 3, the absence of widespread use of microfluidic devices is symptomatic of the problems faced in engineering and manufacturing them.Ĭurrently, the standard engineering practices within research groups for microfluidics design fall within one of two distinct groups: (1) Component Designers (2) System Designers. The integration of microfluidics into experimental microbiology is limited to very few specific use cases in both academia and industry despite numerous advances in the technology 1, 2. Through various case studies, we show 3D μF can be used to reproduce designs from literature, provide metrics for evaluating microfluidic design complexity and showcase how 3D μF is a platform for integrating a wide assortment of engineering techniques used in the design of microfluidic devices as a part of the standard design workflow. 3D μF is the first completely open source interactive microfluidic system designer that readily supports state of the art design automation algorithms.
In this paper, we present an interactive tool for designing continuous flow microfluidic devices. The problem compounds when engineers not only have to test the functionality of the chip but are also expected to optimize them for the robust execution of biological assays. Typical design iterations require the engineer to research the architecture, manually draft the device layout, optimize for manufacturing processes, and manually calculate and program the valve sequences that operate the microfluidic device.
Engineers face significant challenges during the labor-intensive process of designing microfluidic devices, with very few specialized tools that help automate the process.
The design of microfluidic Lab on a Chip (LoC) systems is an onerous task requiring specialized skills in fluid dynamics, mechanical design drafting, and manufacturing.