An automated design of pin-constrained digital microfluidic biochip on MEDA architecture

Abstract

Pin-constrained design of digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) for general purpose assay operations is receiving much attention in recent years as it can reduce the total product cost by simplifying chip fabrication and packaging. Most of the existing works of pin-constrained biochip designs and pin reduction solutions are applicable for specific biotechnology applications. A proficient electrowetting-on-dielectric based architecture namely Microelectrode Dot Array (MEDA) has recently been introduced as a new, highly reconfigurable, scalable and field programmable dot array architecture being capable of undergoing dynamic configuration. In this paper, we present some essential sufficient pin-assignment architecture on pin-constrained MEDA based biochips and propose a pin assignment technique for multifunctional biochips in order to solve the pin reduction problem. Some random specific benchmarks are used for evaluating our technique to prove its effectiveness.