Introduction

This chapter discusses basic concepts and background related to microfluidic technologies, provides motivation for the book topic, and presents an outline of the book. More specifically, it presents an overview of both digital microfluidics and reconfigurable continuous-flow microfluidics technologies, and it describes the working principle of these devices. A review of previous design-automation and optimization techniques for different microfluidic technologies along with advances in cyber-physical integration is presented. This chapter shows that, despite the advances of such optimization techniques, the miniaturization of complex biomolecular analysis protocols requires a new design methodology, which constructs a multi-layered architecture for cyber-physical microfluidic biochips. Finally, this chapter introduces security risks of integrated biomolecular analysis systems and motivates the solutions described later in this book.