Title:	Automated Design of Microfluidics-Based Biochips: Connecting Biochemistry to Electronics CAD
Date:	March 12, 2007 (Monday)
Time:	2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Venue:	Room 121, 1/F, Ho Sin-hang Engineering Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T.
Speaker:	Prof. Krishnendu Chakrabarty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Duke University USA

ABSTRACT:

Microfluidics-based biochips are revolutionizing laboratory procedures involving molecular biology. Advances in microfluidics technology offer exciting possibilities for high-throughput DNA sequencing analysis, protein crystallization, drug discovery, immunoassays, and environmental toxicity monitoring. Another emerging application area for microfluidics-based biochips is clinical diagnostics, especially the immediate point-of-care diagnosis of diseases.

As microfluidic biochips mature into multifunctional devices with reconfiguration capabilities, automated design and ease of use become extremely important. There is a need to deliver the same level of computer-aided design (CAD) support to the biochip designer that the semiconductor industry now takes for granted. These CAD tools will allow designers to harness the new technology that is rapidly emerging for integrated biofluidics.

This talk will present early work on design and test techniques for microfluidic biochips. The speaker will describe synthesis tools that can map behavioral descriptions to a droplet-based microfluidic biochip and generate an optimized schedule of bioassay operations, the binding of assay operations to functional units, and the layout and droplet flow-paths for the biochip. Cost-effective testing techniques will be presented to detect faults after manufacture and during field operation. It will be shown how on-line and off-line reconfiguration techniques can be used to easily bypass faults once they are detected. Thus the biochip user can concentrate on the development of the nano- and micro-scale bioassays, leaving implementation details to design automation tools.

BIOGRAPHY:

Krishnendu Chakrabarty received the B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1990, and the M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1992 and 1995, respectively, all in Computer Science and Engineering. He is now Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Dr. Chakrabarty is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Faculty (CAREER) award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award, the Humboldt Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, and several best papers awards at IEEE conferences. His current research projects include: testing of system-on-chip integrated circuits; microfluidic biochips; microfluidics-based chip cooling; wireless sensor networks.

Prof. Chakrabarty is a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society for 2006-2007 and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society for 2006-2007. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and System I, ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems. He is an Editor of IEEE Design & Test of Computers and of the Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications (JETTA). Prof. Chakrabarty is a senior member of IEEE, a senior member of ACM, and a member of Sigma Xi.

Enquiries: Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444

For more information, please refer to http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/seminar