An intelligent compaction technique for pin constrained routing in Cross referencing digital microfluidic biochips

Abstract

The recent advances in microfluidic technology have resulted in the emergence of commercially successful lab-on-chip systems that manifested as applicable devices in the wide range of areas e.g. high-throughput DNA sequencing, immunoassays and clinical chemistry, environmental toxicity monitoring and point of-care diagnosis of diseases. The current generation of microfluidic devices termed as digital microfluidic biochips (DMFB) are capable of manipulating individual droplets of chemicals on a 2D planar array of electrodes. A special class of DMFB classified as Cross-referencing biochip has currently drawn major attention for targeted integration of multiple bioassay protocols. However, for parallel execution of multiple bioassays within a single array - these chips face a serious issue of electrode interference during simultaneous routing of droplets. In this paper, we propose a routing-aware zone-based detailed placement and compaction technique that reorients the droplet locations on a pre-synthesized Bioassay schematic fulfilling the requisite dependency constraints necessary for efficient execution# of the specified bioassay protocols. The focus for the proposed scheme include (i)enhanced routing in respect of less overall and average routing time, optimum cell utilization (ii)minimum or no crossover with intelligent collision avoidance, and (iii) optimized pin utilization with intelligent pin clustering and hence overcoming the major issue of electrode interference for Cross referencing biochips. Simulations are carried out on three test benches of Benchmark suite III, and the results obtained are encouraging. Copyright 2012 ACM.