A New Combined Routing Technique in Digital Microfluidic Biochip

Abstract

In last one decade, Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) are providing a well-organized platform in field of biochemical study. Particularly in the area of clinical diagnostic related applications, DMFBs provides low priced, movable and disposable tools. In a large section of DMFBs, actuation of droplet is accomplished by the method of electro wetting-on-dielectric, where nano-liter volume liquid or droplet can be controlled and manipulated on two-dimensional array of electrode. A most important design automation concern in DMFBs is the parallel transportation of droplet in a time multiplexed way inside a 2D array of electrode. The requirement of droplet routing is to organize the transportation of droplets in parallel by minimizing resource usage by satisfying maximum allowed time for routing. A droplet can be either homogeneous or heterogeneous. For routing of homogeneous type droplets, main aim is to share same electrodes between several route paths of different droplets for minimizing cell usage. In other words, our aim is to maximizing the cross contaminations. For heterogeneous type droplets our main aim is to eliminate or minimize the cross contamination. In most of the previous works, algorithm has been proposed either for homogenous or for heterogeneous droplet routing. In this work, we proposed an algorithm for combined routing. Our algorithm as input takes a sub-problem consists with a set of homogeneous droplets and a set of heterogeneous droplets. Then our algorithm applies homogeneous routing for homogeneous droplets where it will maximize contaminations and for heterogeneous droplets it will minimize contaminations by applying heterogeneous routing. We have applied our algorithm on a test12_12_2 present in bench mark suite I. In test12_12_2 sub-problem, we have 12 droplets. We have assumed six droplets are homogeneous and remaining is heterogeneous.