The BioSCAN circuit board can be installed into the VMEbus backplane of a Sun-4 or a Silicon Graphics workstation. The board architecture was designed with the goals of modularity and reusability of subsystems, testability during manufacturing and field installation, ease of installation and configuration, and scalability and parallelism using multiple ASICs. The BioSCAN board consists of over 250 equivalent ICs including 23 PLDs. These devices are connected by over 1700 signals on a circuit board with 4 signal layers and 2 power planes. The system was extensively simulated using the Verilog-XL simulator and worked the very first time it was powered up.