Application-specific fault-tolerant architecture synthesis for digital microfluidic biochips

Abstract

Microfluidic-based biochips are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers, and are able to integrate onchip all the necessary functions for biochemical analysis using microfluidics. The digital microfluidic biochips are based on the manipulation of liquids not as a continuous flow, but as discrete droplets on an array of electrodes. Microfluidic operations, such as transport, mixing, split, are performed on this array by routing the corresponding droplets on a series of electrodes. Researchers have proposed several approaches for the synthesis of digital microfluidic biochips. All previous work assumes that the biochip architecture is given, and most approaches consider a rectangular shape for the electrode array. However, non-regular application-specific architectures are common in practice. Hence, in this paper, we propose an approach to the application-specific architecture synthesis. Our approach can also help the designer to increase the yield by introducing redundant electrodes to tolerate permanent faults. The proposed architecture synthesis algorithm has been evaluated using several benchmarks.