Microfluidic devices are emerging as an attractive technology for automatically orchestrating complex biology protocols, with applications ranging from biomedical research to biological computing. The device technology in microfluidics has been advancing faster than Moore's Law, with the number of features (valves) per chip doubling every 4.5 months. However, current microfluidic chips remain very inflexible, designed and fabricated for a narrow application domain.

The Microfluidics lab is developing new hardware and software abstractions to support fully programmable, general-purpose microfluidic chips. Their approach uses a digital design: fluidic samples are discretized into unit volumes, isolated from one another, and manipulated independently during operation. Biologists use a high-level programming language called BioStream to map their own unique experiment to our general-purpose chips. In this way, a biology experiment becomes a "program" that can be seamlessly mapped across successive generations of microfluidic chips.

This work is a collaboration between Prof. Saman Amarasinghe (MIT/EECS), Prof. Todd Thorsen (MIT/Mechanical Engineering), and Prof. Jeremy Gunawardena (Harvard Medical School). Graduate students include J.P. Urbanski, Bill Thies, David Craig, and Natalie Andrew (postdoc).

The research is supported by the National Science Foundation.

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See also:

Abstraction Layers for Scalable Microfluidic Biocomputers

Digital Microfluidics Using Soft Lithography

Programmable Microfluidics