Specification, Integration, and Benchmarking of Continuous Flow Microfluidic Devices Invited Paper Radhakrishna Sanka Boston University Boston, Massachusetts sanka@bu.edu Brian Crites University of California, Riverside Riverside, California bcrit001@ucr.edu Jefrey McDaniel University of California, Riverside Riverside, California jmcda001@ucr.edu Philip Brisk University of California, Riverside Riverside, California philip@cs.ucr.edu Douglas Densmore Boston University Boston, Massachusetts dougd@bu.edu ABSTRACT The lack of standardization in the specifcation and representation of microfuidic designs and their corresponding architectures is one of the largest hurdles faced by the developers of Microfuidic De- sign Automation (MDA) tools. In this paper, we introduce MINT,a Microfuidic Hardware Description Language (MHDL) for defning components and devices in a human readable manner, and Parch- Mint, an MDA interchange format and associated benchmark suite that can be used to compare the performance of diferent physical design algorithms. We further demonstrate how the introduction of MINT and ParchMint into the engineering workfow can bridge the gaps from the specifcation to the fabrication of microfuidic devices. While recent eforts to democratize microfuidics have been recog- nized by the community, there is an unfortunate lack of open source tools, design languages, and standards. Consequently, microfuidic designs shared on open platforms such as Metafuidics[15] leave conceptual gaps in terms of missing design information that are necessary to realize the łcreative process fows" (Reproduce, Remix, and Test multiple systems). MINT and ParchMint are open source projects, which allows the community to contribute and extend their functionality to enable advanced algorithmic methodologies and new commercialization possibilities that difer from the verti- cally integrated industries we see today. KEYWORDS Microfuidics, Design Automation, Standards, Benchmarking 1 INTRODUCTION The potential to integrate Laboratory-on-a-chip (LoC) devices to in- crease the throughput and repeatability of laboratory experiments has spurred research eforts toward Microfuidic Design Automa- tion (MDA) [2]; while algorithmic progress has been reported, there has been an abject failure at the community level to integrate these algorithms into practical tools that are usable by microfuidic de- signers. One major impediment is the lack of standardized design specifcation systems and interface formats that describe a suf- cient set of physical parameters to facilitate direct and unbiased comparison among academic MDA software artifacts, coupled with Figure 1: The four levels of abstraction in the continuous fow microfuidic physical design generation process that is captured by MINT and ParchMint. MINT captures the design of a microfuidic device in the TECHNOLOGY and ARCHI- TECTURE levels in a human-readable format that encapsu- lates the designer’s perspective. The ParchMint standard in- terchange format allows for the design captured in MINT to be converted into a machine-readable format appropriate for PHYSICAL DESIGN algorithms, and artwork generation algorithms at the FABRICATION level. a path to fabrication to allow for experimental validation of these designs in a laboratory setting.