Fluid-level synthesis unifying reliability, contamination avoidance, and capacity-wastage-aware washing for droplet-based microfluidic biochips

摘要

Production of correct bioassay outcome is the foremost objective in digital microfluidic biochips (or DMFBs). In high-frequency DMFBs, continuous actuation of electrodes leads to malfunctioning or even breakdown of the system. The improper functioning of a biochip tends to produce erroneous results. On the other hand, while transporting droplets, the residues may get stuck to electrode walls and cause contamination to other droplets. To ensure proper assay outcome, washing becomes mandatory, whose incorporation may delay the bioassay completion time significantly. Furthermore, each wash droplet possesses a capacity constraint within which the residues can be washed off successfully. Evidently, the design objectives possess a large degree of trade-offs among themselves and must be attacked to prepare an efficient platform. Here, the authors propose a complete fluid-level synthesis considering all the essential goals together instead of dealing with them in isolation. The presented approach effectively handles the trade-off scenarios and provides flexibility to the designer to decide the threshold of the individual optimisation objective leading to the construction of a good-quality solution as a whole. The performance is evaluated over several benchmark bioassays.