Multi-terminal PCB escape routing for digital microfluidic biochips using negotiated congestion

Abstract

Abstract-This paper introduces a multi-terminal escape routing algorithm for the design of Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) that control Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs). The new algorithm is based on the principle of negotiated congestion, which has been applied in the past to problems including FPGA routing and PCB escape routing for single-terminal nets. PCBs designed for Pin-constrained DMFBs, in which one control pin may drive multiple electrodes, require multi-terminal escape routing solutions. Experimental results indicate that negotiated congestion is more effective for multi-terminal escape routing than existing techniques, which are based on maze routing coupled with rip-up and re-route, yielding an overall reduction in the number of PCB layers in most the test cases that were tried.

An open-source compiler and PCB synthesis tool for digital microfluidic biochips

“…Under pin sharing, some RAUs are unavoidable, but power savings can be achieved in RAUs are taken into account. After pin mapping, the PCB wire route is computed using an algorithm proposed by McDaniel et al [52].…”

“…(a) Pin assignment and (b) wire routing solutions for an application-specific DMFB designed for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [46,86]. (c) Pin assignment and (d) PCB escape routing solutions for a general-purpose pin-constrained DMFB that can execute and biochemical reaction that can fit within the space provided [52]. Each PCB routing layer is represented by a different color.…”

“…6, the wire router constructs and maintains a routing graph [49,52,78]. The wire graph is generated automatically from two user-specified parameters: the horizontal capacity (hcap) and the vertical capacity (vcap).…”

“…We have implemented one PCB wire routing algorithm, which works well enough for our purposes [52]. The algorithm is based on the paradigm of negotiated congestion, which was originally applied to FPGA routing [53].…”

“…The algorithm is based on the paradigm of negotiated congestion, which was originally applied to FPGA routing [53]. The original negotiated congestion-based escape router considered only single-terminal nets [49]; we modified it to support multi-terminal nets using the approach taken by the FPGA routers [52].…”