Microfluidic large-scale integration

We developed high-density micro fluidic chips that contain plumbing networks with thousands of micromechanical valves and hundreds of individually addressable chambers. These fluidic devices are analogous to electronic integrated circuits fabricated using large-scale integration. A key component of these networks is the fluidic multiplexor, which is a combinatorial array of binary valve patterns that exponentially increases the processing power of a network by allowing complex fluid manipulations with a minimal number of inputs. We used these integrated micro fluidic networks to construct the micro fluidic analog of a comparator array and a micro fluidic memory storage device whose behavior resembles random-access memory.