Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Tabl e 2. 2
Synthesis results
for the bioassay shown
in Fig.
2.1
a
Operation
Start time
Stop time
Resource
Location
Mix 1
6
12
3
2 mixer
(2, 6)
Mix 2
0
6
2
3 mixer
(2, 5)
Mix 3
0
10
2
2 mixer
(6, 2)
Mix 4
12
15
4
4 mixer
(4, 6)
Mix 5
15
18
4
2 mixer
(4, 6)
Tabl e 2. 3
Synthesis results
for the bioassay shown
in Fig.
2.1
a
Operation
Start time
Stop time
Resource
Location
Mix 1
6
12
3
2 mixer
(2, 6)
Mix 2
0
6
2
3 mixer
(2, 5)
Mix 3
0
10
2
2 mixer
(6, 2)
Mix 4
12
15
4
4 mixer
(4, 6)
Mix 5
15
18
4
2 mixer
(4, 6)
2.3.3
Comparison Between Two Sensing Schemes
The two sensing schemes introduced in Sect.
2.2.1
have differences in the context
of fault diagnosis, error-recovery, and dynamic re-synthesis.
The diagnosis of an electrode with trapped charge can be used to illustrate the
difference between these two sensing systems. Suppose a splitting operation with
unbalanced droplets occurs, as shown in Fig.
2.8
. In the CCD camera-based sensing
system, Electrode 1 can easily be identified as the electrode with residual charges
because the droplet volume is smaller than normal volume.
On the other hand, for the optical detector-based sensing system, the outputs of
splitter, which consists of Electrodes 1, 2 and 3 shown in Fig.
2.8
b will not be used
any more. In contrast to the diagnosis result of CCD camera-based sensing system,
Electrode 2 and 3 can no longer be used, leading to wastage of on-chip resources.
Next, we use the bioassay shown in Fig.
2.1
to further illustrate the differences
of these two sensing schemes.
Suppose the droplets for dispensing operations 1 to 6 in Fig.
2.1
a are generated
from different dispensing ports. For for all the mixing operations of the bioassay
shown in Fig.
2.1
a, their synthesis results are shown in Table
2.3
. The module
placement result corresponding to synthesis result in Table
2.3
can be found
in Fig.
2.9
.
It is important to note that, in Table
2.3
, “resource” refers to part of the electrode
array occupied by the mixing operation. The location of a mixer is expressed in
terms of the location of the electrode at the upper left corner of the mixer. For
example, the upper left corner of the mixing module M
1
is in the sixth row and
second column; it includes an electrode array with 2 rows and 3 columns. Thus the
mixer is described as a 3
2 mixer at the location (2, 6).
Suppose that in the operation Mix 3 shown in Table
2.3
, the DNA-fouling
phenomenon occurs after the operation has been underway for 3 s. For the optical
