A multi-pin droplet routing algorithm for digital microfluidic biochips

Abstract

Digital microfluidic biochips have emerged as a major area of attention in the fields of Clinical Research, Medical diagnostics and are destined to revolutionize the biological laboratory procedure in coming years. As the use of Digital microfluidic biochips becomes widespread in safety critical biomedical applications - the need for enhanced automation for the complex biological procedures become more pronounced. In this paper, we attempted to design a high performance routing procedure applicable for multi-pin digital microfluidic biochips that deals with multiple source target routing in a concurrent manner using hierarchical approach. The avoidance of cross contamination is a key challenge in the design of a biochip. Our paper attempts to minimize this problem while parallel routing of droplets with an aim to optimize the cell utilization and minimize the overall routing time as well. The proposed method uses a special technique for clustering the sub-problems together and uses a hierarchical scheme to optimize the routing process. Empirical results obtained are quite encouraging.