A novel high performance routing technique for cross-referencing DMFBs

Abstract

Micro and Nano fabricated devices have led to revolutionary changes in manipulation of tiny volumes of fluids scaled down to nanoliters. The rapid development of Microfluidic Technology has led to the evolution of a new generation of devices namely digital microfluidic biochip that combines electronics with biology to integrate various bioassay operations on a single substrate. Digital Microfluidic Biochips are classified into two sub-classes: Direct addressing and Crossreferencing biochips. Cross-referencing Biochip Technology scales down the number of pins per chip drastically, thereby reducing the costs of manufacturing and testing. This enables large scale design in a single biochip. However the issue of electrode interference poses a hard problem for simultaneous routing of droplets. In this paper we used a preferential grouping scheme to group a series of source droplets placed in the same row or same column and route each group simultaneously with priority-based stalling for intelligent collision avoidance. A trade-off between stalling and detour is used to optimize the route path for each pair of source and destination, while taking care of all the associated constraints. The objectives of the proposed method are to minimize: (i) latest arrival time, (ii) Total routing time as well as average routing time (iii) number of pins to be used and (iv) total cell utilization. The algorithm is implemented using Benchmark Suite III and the results obtained are quite encouraging.