Communications and switching in microfluidic systems: pure hydrodynamic control for networking labs-on-a-chip

Microfluidics deals with manipulation and control of fluids which flow in constrained sub-millimetric media. In this paper communication concepts and networking approaches, typical of telecommunications, are extended to the microfluidic domain. The work illustrated in this paper investigates on possible approaches to information encoding and evaluation of the corresponding channel capacity as well as design of switching solutions. Based on the results of this study, the Hydrodynamic Controlled Microfluidic Network (HCN) paradigm is proposed, which is based on a pure hydrodynamic microfluidic switching function. The HCN paradigm can be applied to interconnect Labs-on-a-Chip (LoCs) in a microfluidic network in which chemical/biological samples are routed between the LoCs by exploiting hydrodynamic effects only. The resulting LoCs are expected to be highly flexible and inexpensive, and thus to become extremely useful in chemical/biological analysis and synthesis.