A Design Optimization for Pin-Constrained Paper-based Digital Microfluidic Biochips Integrating Fluid-Control Co-Design Issues

TLDR: This paper presents a fluid-control co-design considering several important cost-driving issues like minimization of schedule length, control pin count, and wirelength, together with congestion-free and conflict-free wiring.

Abstract: Paper-based digital microfluidic biochips (PDMFBs) are becoming highly effective among the microfluidic platforms due to its low-cost and in-place fabrication. The designed electrodes and wiring can be fabricated on a piece of paper by an inkjet printer and conductive ink containing carbon nanotube particles (CNTs). However, due to induced control interference, the wires cannot pass by an arbitrary electrode. Each wire that is to be routed possesses its conflict electrode group, which must be avoided for a feasible droplet movement. This paper presents a fluid-control co-design considering several important cost-driving issues like minimization of schedule length, control pin count, and wirelength, together with congestion-free and conflict-free wiring. Observably, design gaps exist among the sub-tasks of the fluid-level, control-level, and fluid-control as a whole, due to their separate considerations. It indeed introduces many design cycles lengthening the design process, and thus increases the overall cost. In this context, this work integrates the sub-tasks as a prior need to obtain a low cost and efficient platform. Several benchmarks have been studied to evaluate the performance.