Performance Improvements and Congestion Reduction for Routing-Based Synthesis for Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Windh, Skyler; Phung, Calvin; Grissom, Daniel; Pop, Paul; Brisk, Philip

doi:10.1109/tcad.2016.2557726

Cited by 21 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…In [29], congestion avoidance and washing mechanisms are mentioned for routing-based synthesis technique. The chip operating frequency assumed to be 100 Hz, which produces a switching time of 10 ms but no references are available where mixing operations can be performed in real-life chips at such an high frequency.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such an assumption is inappropriate to take as most of the applications on DMF chips involve fluidic operations on viscous analyte or medium, making it very difficult to apply such 100 Hz fast switching. In addition, the mentioned techniques in [29] cannot be applied to cyberphysical chips where real-time error detection and error control are two important aspects and need to be addressed separately.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, module-based synthesis methodologies decrease the chip utilization factor [ 4 ] as huge numbers of guard cells are occupied during the module operations to pad the mixer droplets from cross-contamination with other existing droplets on the chip. Very few works has been presented omitting the concept of dedicated modules on DMFB’s till date [ 1 , 4 , 19 , 29 ]. Maftei et al [ 19 ] first proposed the concept of routing-based synthesis where mixing time was improved by avoiding flow reversibility and eliminating static pivot points present in different mixing modules.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also in all the earlier works on module less synthesis for DMFB [ 4 , 19 , 29 ], the concept of negative mixing completion for (read as ‘one-hundred eighty degree’) shift-movements of the mixer droplet was empirically deduced. Such concept of negative mixing / reverse-mixing of micro-droplets is simply incorrect and was a result of erroneous mathematical model.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An efficient module-less synthesis approach for Digital Microfluidic Biochip

Chakraborty

2020

SN Appl. Sci.

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Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) will require error-free synthesis techniques which can function at much higher speed while implementing on real-time systems and capable of tackling more complex assay operations. Until now various bio-assays are successfully implemented based on different mixing modules present on such lab-on-chips. In present work, the concept of such dedicated virtual modules has been eliminated and a novel module-less-synthesis (MLS) method is proposed for accomplishing high-performance bio-protocols. Various shift-patterns (movements) of the micro-droplets are identified to accomplish entire mixing in lesser time compared to earlier module-based synthesis methods. We have also computed the percentage of mixing accomplishment for each directional-shift of the mixerdroplet. However, path congestion problem and operational errors are inevitable in MLS approach. Hence, the path congestion and washing problem in MLS is addressed by tweaking the earlier MLS approach and a new modified-MLS (MMLS) method is proposed. Finally, washing optimization technique on MMLS method is also given. Different real-life bio assays like PCR, IVD are tested with the proposed technique as well as synthetic benchmarks (hard test benches) are also incorporated in the experiments. For both kind of benchmarks synthesis performance improved with bioassay completion time (T max) significantly reduced compared to existing synthesis approaches on DMFB platform.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An efficient module-less synthesis approach for Digital Microfluidic Biochip

Chakraborty

2020

SN Appl. Sci.

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“…When the operation is completed, the module used for the operation will be canceled, and the electrodes used by this module can be recombined into other modules for other operations. Therefore, the module for performing basic operations is dynamically reconfigurable [12], [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unified Contamination-Aware Routing Method Considering Realistic Washing Capacity Constraint in Digital Microfluidic Biochips

et al. 2020

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To fully utilize the dynamic reconfigurability of digital microfluidic biochips, most of electrodes would be shared by different droplets. Thus, contaminations caused by liquid residues among droplets are inevitable which lead to lethal errors in bioassays. To remove the contaminations, washing operations are introduced as an essential step to ensure the correctness of bioassay. However, existing works have oversimplified assumptions on the washing droplet's behavior and constraints which cannot clean all contaminations with erroneous outcomes. Moreover, straightforward integration of washing operations with droplet routing may increase the execution time of a bioassay which is not feasible for timing-critical bioassay. To effectively remove contaminations and minimize the execution time of a bioassay, this paper proposes a unified contamination-aware routing method, which addresses the above issues simultaneously. Firstly, we present a top-down scheme to generate candidates of routing paths, then construct a shortestpath model to select desirable routing solution for all subproblems. With a decision diagram of droplets, we further propose an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation to compact the execution time. Finally, contamination removal by washing droplets with realistic washing capacity is considered for all subproblems. Tested on real-life benchmarks, our proposed method can significantly reduce 72% contamination spots and save 11% execution time. INDEX TERMS Digital microfluidic biochip, dynamic reconfigurability, washing operations, contamination aware routing, integer linear programming.

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