Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Error-Recovery in Cyberphysical Biochips
In this chapter, through exploiting recent advances in the integration of sensing
system in a digital microfluidics biochip, we present a “physical-aware” system
reconfiguration technique that uses sensor data at intermediate checkpoints to
reconfigure the biochip dynamically. A cyberphysical re-synthesis technique is
used to recompute electrode-actuation sequences, thereby deriving new results
for module placement, droplet routing pathways, and operation schedules, with
minimum impact on the time-to-response.
The key contributions of this chapter are as follows:
•
A charge-coupled device (CCD)-based sensing system for digital microfluidic
biochips (Sect.
2.2
).
•
An imaging algorithm for the measurement and tracking of droplets based on
real-time data from a CCD camera (Sect.
2.2
).
•
A reliability-driven error-recovery strategy (Sect.
2.3
).
•
Parallel recombinative simulated annealing (PRSA)-based and greedy algorithms
for reliability-driven synthesis (Sect.
2.4
).
•
Simulation results for three representative bioassays (Sect.
2.5
).
2.1
Motivation and Related Prior Work
The ease of reconfigurability and software-based control in digital microfluidics has
inspired research on various aspects of automated chip design and chip applications.
A number of techniques have been published for architectural-level synthesis [
1
],
module placement, and droplet routing [
2
-
4
]. However, these techniques ignore
practical realities or domain-specific constraints that arise from attempting to
carry out biochemical reactions and microfluidic operations on an electronic chip.
