Method of droplet routing in digital microfluidic biochip

Abstract

One of the challenging research areas nowadays is the design and use of microfluidic biochips, the digital microfluidic biochips (DMFB). It is used for analysis of different biological samples like protein, sirum etc using an array of electrically controlled electrodes. This paper deals with a challenging problem related to the design of DMFB. Specifically the design problem considered is related to high-performance droplet routing, where each droplet has single source location and single target location. The objectives are (i) minimizing the number of electrodes used in the DMFB, and (ii) minimizing total routing time/latest arrival time of all the droplet at their target locations. We propose a simple algorithm for concurrent path allocation to multiple droplets, based on the classical shortest-path algorithm, together with the use of stalling, and possible detouring of droplets in cases of contentions. The algorithm is also extended to droplet routing where a droplet may have two source positions and a single target position. The algorithm is implemented on a Linux platform and empirical results are quite encouraging.