Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time based Scheduling for Digital Microfluidic Biochips

One of the recent emerging technology in biochemical analysis field is Lab-on-chip (LOC) technology which uses digital microfluidics property to manipulate droplets discretely. LOC efficiently carries out all biochemical operations we do in traditional laboratories on a single reconfigurable chip called as Digital Microfluidic Biochip (DMFB). DMFBs helps to achieve parallelism and miniaturization compared to traditional laboratory methods in terms of samples and equipment used. One of the important problem in DMFB synthesis is scheduling. We present a simple method called as Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time for digital microfluidics (DMHEFT) for scheduling DMFB. It is a greedy heuristic based list scheduling. HEFT is previously used for task scheduling where multiple heterogeneous processors are available for solving inter-dependent tasks depicted as DAG. In this paper, it is applied to Microfluidic biochips. DMHEFT uses Upward rank value to prioritize the tasks or operations and earliest finish time to assign tasks to different modules like mixers, heaters and detectors etc. Simulation results show that it produces better assay lengths and run time compared to existing algorithms.