A Generalized Technique of Automated Pin Sharing on Hexagonal Electrode Based Digital Microfluidic Biochip Along with Its Design Methodology

Abstract

Digital based microfluidic biochip appeals to the notion of microfluidic technology, with a wide variety of applications in electronics, biology, chemistry, environmental science, etc. Such a composite system replaces the conventional laboratory experiments by handling liquids as discrete with nanolitre or microliter volumes and providing reconfigurable and scalable devices following the electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) principle. In this paper, we have focused on a new application area of digital microfluidic biochip technology with regular hexagonal electrode instead of conventional square electrodes. The structural and behavioural facets of the proposed hexagonal electrode digital microfluidic biochip (HDMFB) are discussed regarding its associated methodology in comparison with the existing square electrodes. Additionally, care is taken about the key challenges to influence the multiplexed bioassay operation, control pin assignment for safe droplet routing and mixing operation. An algorithm is proposed here to control the whole HDMFB array with minimum pin sharing. Finally, a scheduled bioassay is performed on the HDMFB and the result is compared with the existing one.