A New Method for Route Based Synthesis and Placement in Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Digital microfluidic Biochips (DMFB) have been developed as a promising platform for Lab-on-chip systems that manipulate individual droplets of chemicals on a 2D planar array of electrodes. Such systems can perform rapid automated biochemical analysis that can be applied to a wide variety of applications including on-chip immunoassays, environmental toxicity monitoring, high-throughput DNA sequencing, point-of-care diagnostics, and biochemical sensing. Design of DMFBs involves system level synthesis -that starts from a given bioassay protocol with a specified biochip architecture and determines the resource allocation, scheduling of individual operations followed by placement of modules and the nets (both in terms of source, targets and mixers) for the said application. In this paper we have proposed a new technique of droplet based route aware synthesis followed by placement to generate a layout that greatly minimizes the utilization of resources in the form of hard blockages termed as modules as well as enhances the routing process in terms of overall completion time for execution of multiple bioassay protocols simultaneously. Using the inherent nature of reconfigurability and scalability of DMFBs the utilization of resources in terms of fixed modules has been greatly reduced and corresponding results tested on three PCRs are found to be encouraging in relation to contemporary works. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.