Exact Routing for Micro-Electrode-Dot-Array Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Oliver Keszöcze, Zipeng Li, Andreas Grimmer, Robert Wille, Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Rolf Drechsler

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceedingspeer-review

Abstract

Digital microfluidics are an emerging technology that provide fluidic-handling capabilities on a chip. One of the most important issues when conducting experiments on such a biochip is the routing of droplets. A more recent variant of biochips use a micro-electrode-dot-array (MEDA) which yields a finer controllability of the droplets. Although this new technology allows for more advanced routing possibilities, this also poses new challenges to corresponding CAD methods. In contrast to conventional microfluidic biochips, droplets on MEDA biochips may diagonally move on the grid and are not bound to have the same shape during the whole experiment. In this work, we present an exact routing method that copes with these challenges while, at the same time, guarantees to find the minimal solution with respect to completion time. For the first time, this allows for evaluating the benefits of MEDA biochips compared to their conventional counterparts as well as a quality assessment of previously proposed routing methods in this domain.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAsia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)
Pages708-713
Number of pages6
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Fields of science

  • 102 Computer Sciences
  • 202 Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Information Engineering

JKU Focus areas

  • Computation in Informatics and Mathematics
  • Mechatronics and Information Processing
  • Nano-, Bio- and Polymer-Systems: From Structure to Function

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