A New Fluid-Chip Co-Design for Digital Microfluidic Biochips Considering Cost Drivers and Design Convergence

TLDR: This paper aims to propose a fluid-chip co-design methodology in dealing with the consideration of the fluid- chip cost drivers, while reducing the design cycles in between.

Abstract: The design process for digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) is becoming more complex due to the growing need for essential bio-protocols. A number of significant fluid- and chip-level synthesis tools have been offered previously for designing an efficient system. Several important cost drivers like bioassay schedule length, total pin count, congestion-free wiring, total wire length, and total layer count together measure the efficiency of the DMFBs. Besides, existing design gaps among the sub-tasks of the fluid and chip level make the design process expensive delaying the time-to-market and increasing the overall cost. In this context, removal of design cycles among the sub-tasks is a prior need to obtain a low-cost and efficient platform. Hence, this paper aims to propose a fluid-chip co-design methodology in dealing with the consideration of the fluid-chip cost drivers, while reducing the design cycles in between. A simulation study considering a number of benchmarks has been presented to observe the performance.