A Generic Defect Aware Heuristic Approach for Droplet Routing in a Digital Microfluidic Biochip with Minimal Pin Assignment

Abstract

Multi-tasking digital microfluidic biochip raises some challenging issues in droplet routing in presence of on-chip defects. In this work, a heuristic droplet routing algorithm is proposed that tries to perform defect aware droplet transportation on digital microfluidic biochip. The aim of the proposed algorithm is to design defect-avoiding and pin-count aware routing paths minimizing the following objective functions, (i) number or electrode usage during routing, (ii) routing completion time, and (iii) actuation pin count. The algorithm tries to find electrode fitness through a sum between, numbers of electrode elapsed in routing and an electrode count on rectilinear path between the candidate electrode and target electrode. A candidate electrode with minimum fitness value is selected for next movement in droplet route. During this routing control pins are simultaneously allocated through a comprehensive cooptimization method. This pin assignment technique helps in minimizing reuse of the resources for routing beyond sustainable level. Simulation results are compared with some exiting works and the improvement in this proposed work is quite encouraging.