Module-Based Synthesis of Digital Microfluidic Biochips with Droplet-Aware Operation Execution

Elena Maftei, Paul Pop, Jan Madsen

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Microfluidic biochips represent an alternative to conventional biochemical analyzers. A digital biochip manipulates liquids not as continuous flow, but as discrete droplets on a two-dimensional array of electrodes. Several electrodes are dynamically grouped to form a virtual device, on which operations are executed by moving the droplets. So far, researchers have ignored the locations of droplets inside devices, considering that all the electrodes forming the device are occupied throughout the operation execution. In this article, we consider a droplet-aware execution of microfluidic operations, which means that we know the exact position of droplets inside the modules at each time-step. We propose a Tabu Search-based metaheuristic for the synthesis of digital biochips with droplet-aware operation execution. Experimental results show that our approach can significantly reduce the application completion time, allowing us to use smaller area biochips and thus reduce costs.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2
JournalA C M Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems
Volume9
Issue number1
Number of pages21
ISSN1550-4832
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013

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