An Algorithm for Parallel Assay Operations in a Restricted Sized Chip in Digital Microfluidics

Abstract

Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFB) is revolutionizing many areas of Microelectronics, Biochemistry, and Biomedical sciences. It is also known as 'Lab-on-a-Chip' for its popularity as an alternative for laboratory experiments. Pin count reduction and cross contamination avoidance are some of the core design issues for practical applications. Nowadays, due to emergency and cost effectiveness, more than one assay operations are required to be performed simultaneously. So, parallelism is a necessity in DMFB. Having an area of a given chip as a constraint, how efficiently we can use a restricted sized biochip and how much parallelism can be incorporated are the objectives of this paper. The paper presents a design automation flow that augments parallelism in applications considering cross contamination problem as well.