A new heterogeneous droplet routing technique and its simulator to improve route performance in digital microfluidic biochips

摘要

Digital Micro fluidic based Biochips (DMFBs) in current years have provided an efficient alternative platform in the field of bio-chemical analysis, particularly for inexpensive, convenient, and not reusable devices mainly designed for medical diagnostic applications. For a major class of DMFBs droplet actuation is depend on the rule of electrowetting-on-dielectric, where separate droplets of nano liter volume can be manipulated using 2D array of electrodes. Most important design automation issues in DMFBs is the concurrent routing of droplets inside a 2D array. The reason of droplet steering is needed to plan the movement of a number of droplets in a time synchronized mode within a 2D array while minimizing resource consumption and within optimum latest arrival time. The droplets may be classified as homogeneous or heterogeneous. In case of heterogeneous droplet routing, major issue is the avoidance of cross contamination where as for homogeneous droplet routing sharing of electrodes among different route paths for minimum resource utilization remains the main focus. In our paper, we put forward an algorithm for routing of heterogeneous droplet inDMFBs. We further developed a routing simulator that graphically displays detailed route performance for heterogeneous droplets within a predefined DMFB layout. We have used benchmark suite I and III to analysis our algorithm.