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A New Method for Route Based Synthesis and Placement
in Digital Microfluidic Biochips
Pranab Roy
1
, Samadrita Bhattacharya
1
, Hafizur Rahaman
1
and Parthasarathi Dasgupta
2
1
School of VLSI Technology, Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur, India
2
Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, India
{ronmarine14,rahaman_h}@yahoo.co.in,samadrita.bh@gmail.com,
partha@iimcal.ac.in
Abstract.
Digital microfluidic Biochips (DMFB) have been developed as a
promising platform for Lab-on-chip systems that manipulate individual droplets
of chemicals on a 2D planar array of electrodes. Such systems can perform
rapid automated biochemical analysis that can be applied to a wide variety of
applications including on-chip immunoassays, environmental toxicity
monitoring, high-throughput DNA sequencing, point-of-care diagnostics, and
biochemical sensing. Design of DMFBs involves system level synthesis -that
starts from a given bioassay protocol with a specified biochip architecture and
determines the resource allocation, scheduling of individual operations followed
by placement of modules and the nets (both in terms of source, targets and
mixers) for the said application. In this paper we have proposed a new
technique of droplet based route aware synthesis followed by placement to
generate a layout that greatly minimizes the utilization of resources in the form
of hard blockages termed as modules as well as enhances the routing process in
terms of overall completion time for execution of multiple bioassay protocols
simultaneously. Using the inherent nature of reconfigurability and scalability of
DMFBs the utilization of resources in terms of fixed modules has been greatly
reduced and corresponding results tested on three PCRs are found to be
encouraging in relation to contemporary works.
1
Introduction
Currently medical diagnostics and biochemical analysis systems rely largely on labor
intensive, time consuming and expensive laboratory based bench top methods. A new
technology termed as micro-total analysis system (ʼTAS) has been developed in recent
days as an alternative platform for execution of these cumbersome laboratory methods.
Such devices known as lab-on-chip systems has major advantages of miniaturization,
smaller sample requirements, reduced reagent consumption, decreased analysis time, and
higher levels of throughput and automation. Earlier design of LOC devices were based on
continuous liquid flow being manipulated through microchannels etched within a
substrate. The actuation of flow is implemented through micro-pump and micro-valves
and external actuators. The use of permanently etched channels and microvalves largely
