WG211/M13Rayside

Synthesis of Microfluidics Chips using SMT Solvers by Derek Rayside

Microfluidic chips, lab-on-a-chip devices that have channels transporting liquids instead of wires carrying electrons, have attracted considerable attention recently from the bio-medical industry because of their application in testing assay and large-scale chemical reaction automation. These chips promise dramatic reduction in the cost of large-scale reactions and bio-chemical sensors. Just like in traditional chip design, there is an acute need for automation tools that can assist with design, testing and verification of microfluidics chips. We propose a design methodology and tool to design microfluidic chips based on SMT solvers. The design of these chips is expressed using the language of partial differential equations (PDEs) and non-linear multi-variate polynomials over the reals. We convert such designs into SMT2 format through appropriate approximations, and invoke Z3 and dReal solver on them. Through our experiments we show that using SMT solvers is a not only a viable strategy to address the microfluidics design problem, but likely will be key component of any future development environment.