  Flow-based microfluidic biochips have attracted much atten- tion in the EDA
community due to their miniaturized size and execution efficiency. Previous
research, however, still follows the traditional computing model with a
dedicated storage unit, which actually becomes a bottleneck of the performance
of bio- chips. In this paper, we propose the first architectural synthe- sis
framework considering distributed storage constructed tem- porarily from
transportation channels to cache fluid samples. Since distributed storage can
be accessed more efficiently than a dedicated storage unit and channels can
switch between the roles of transportation and storage easily, biochips with
this dis- tributed computing architecture can achieve a higher execution
efficiency even with fewer resources. Experimental results con- firm that the
execution efficiency of a bioassay can be improved by up to 28% while the
number of valves in the biochip can be reduced effectively.
