Incorporating Multiple Assay Operations and Cross Contamination Avoidance in Digital Microfluidic Biochips with Reduced Number of Pins

Abstract

Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) are becoming more and more capable in areas of biomedical science, biochemistry, and also in microelectronics. It is popularly known as lab-on-a-chip and as the name suggests, laboratory experiments are carried out in it. Multiple assay operations can be performed here effectively and if possible, simultaneously. Thus, in this perspective, parallelism is having tremendous effect in designing biochips, while the dimension of a chip is a limit. In order to enhance the credibility of a chip, one must take care of its throughput, electrode utilization, and pin count as well. If the number of pins that can accomplish all the desired activities of multiple bioassay operations in synchronization can be minimized, the design can be treated as efficient and cost-effective. Earlier work shows that 21 pins are the minimum requirement to achieve the said goal. Whereas, in this article, we have drastically reduced the total number of pins for 15 × 15 arrays. The algorithm developed in this paper requires only 11 pins for the desired tasks. This design is able to avoid the problem of cross contamination, and it has been validated for some considerable real-life assay operations. Thus, in this paper, we are able to show the multiple assay operations in parallel.