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Flexible Droplet Routing in Active Matrix–Based Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Published: 16 March 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The active matrix (AM)-based architecture offers many advantages over conventional digital electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) microfluidic biochips, such as the capability of handling variable-size droplets, more flexible droplet movement, and precise control over droplet navigation. However, a major challenge in choosing the routing paths is to decide when the droplets are to be reshaped depending on the congestion of the intended path, or split- and route sub droplets,and merging them at their respective destinations. As the number of microelectrodes in AM-EWOD chips is large, the path selection problem becomes further complicated. In this article, we propose a negotiation-guided flow based on routing of subdroplets that obviates the explicit need for deciding when the droplets are to be manipulated, yet fully utilizing the power of droplet reshaping, splitting, and merging them to facilitate their journey. The proposed algorithm reduces routing cost and provides more freedom in deadlock avoidance in the presence of multiple routing tasks by assigning certain congestion penalty for sibling subdroplets and fluidic penalty for heterogeneous droplets. Compared to existing techniques, it reduces latest arrival time by an average of 29% for several benchmark and random test suites. Furthermore, our method is observed to provide 100% routability of nets for all test cases, whereas existing and baseline routers fail to produce feasible solutions in many instances. We also propose a reliable mode droplet routing strategy where the number of unreliable splitting operations can be reduced by paying a small penalty on latest arrival time.

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      Published In

      cover image ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
      ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems  Volume 23, Issue 3
      May 2018
      341 pages
      ISSN:1084-4309
      EISSN:1557-7309
      DOI:10.1145/3184476
      • Editor:
      • Naehyuck Chang
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Publication History

      Published: 16 March 2018
      Accepted: 01 January 2018
      Revised: 01 November 2017
      Received: 01 June 2017
      Published in TODAES Volume 23, Issue 3

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      Author Tags

      1. Physical design automation
      2. biochips
      3. droplet routing
      4. microfluidics

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      • Taiwan MOST
      • Nanotechnology Research Triangle
      • DST-funded Indo-Taiwan Bilateral Research
      • Indian Statistical Institute
      • INAE Chair Professorship

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      • (2024)Pebble Traversal-Based Fault Detection and Advanced Reconfiguration Technique for Digital Microfluidic BiochipsJournal of Electronic Testing10.1007/s10836-024-06137-340:4(573-587)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2024
      • (2023)An Efficient Capacity-based Routing Technique on MEDA-based BiochipsIETE Journal of Research10.1080/03772063.2023.218530670:3(2501-2514)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2023
      • (2023)A deep-reinforcement learning approach for optimizing homogeneous droplet routing in digital microfluidic biochipsNanotechnology and Precision Engineering10.1063/10.00173506:2Online publication date: 8-Mar-2023
      • (2022)A Survey on Security of Digital Microfluidic Biochips: Technology, Attack, and DefenseACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/349469727:4(1-33)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2022
      • (2022)Shape-Dependent Velocity Based Droplet Routing on MEDA BiochipsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.322305410(122423-122430)Online publication date: 2022
      • (2022)An evolutionary algorithm with indirect representation for droplet routing in digital microfluidic biochipsEngineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence10.1016/j.engappai.2022.105305115(105305)Online publication date: Oct-2022
      • (2021)A Framework for Validation of Synthesized MicroElectrode Dot Array Actuations for Digital Microfluidic BiochipsACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/346043726:6(1-36)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2021
      • (2021)Droplet Transportation in MEDA-Based Biochips: An Enhanced Technique for Intelligent Cross-Contamination AvoidanceIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.1109/TVLSI.2021.307141029:7(1451-1464)Online publication date: Jul-2021
      • (2021)Design-for-Trust Techniques for Digital Microfluidic Biochip Layout with Error Control MechanismIEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics10.1109/TCBB.2021.3054622(1-1)Online publication date: 2021
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