Module Placement under Completion-Time Uncertainty in Micro-Electrode-Dot-Array Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) are an emerging technology that are replacing traditional laboratory procedures. With the integrated functions which are necessary for biochemical experiments, DMFBs are able to achieve automatic experiments. Recently, DMFBs based on a new architecture called micro-electrode-dot-array (MEDA) have been demonstrated. Compared with conventional DMFBs which sensors are specifically located, each microelectrode is integrated with a sensor on MEDA-based biochips. Benefiting from the advantage of MEDA-based biochips, real-time reaction-outcome detection is attainable. However, to the best of our knowledge, synthesis algorithms proposed in the literature for MEDA-based biochips do not fully utilize the real-time detection since completion-time uncertainties have not yet been considered. During the execution of a biochemical experiment, operations may finish earlier or delay due to variability and randomness in biochemical reactions. Such uncertainties also have effects when allocating modules for each fluidic operation and placing them on a biochip since a biochip with a fixed size area restricts the number and the size of these modules. Thus, in this paper, we proposed the first operation-variation-aware placement algorithm that fully utilizes the real-time detection since completion-time uncertainties have been considered. Simulation results demonstrate that with the proposed approach, it leads to reduced time-to-result and minimizes the chip size while not exceeding completion time compared to the benchmarks.