A Cross-Referencing-Based Droplet Manipulation Method for High-Throughput and Pin-Constrained Digital Microfluidic Arrays

Digital microfluidic biochips are revolutionizing high-throughput DNA sequencing, immunoassays, and clinical diagnostics. As high-throughput bioassays are mapped to digital microfluidic platforms, the need for design automation techniques for pin-constrained biochips is being increasingly felt. However, most prior work on biochips CAD has assumed independent control of the underlying electrodes using a large number of (electrical) input pins. The authors propose a droplet manipulation method based on a "cross-referencing" addressing method that uses "row" and "columns" to access electrodes. By mapping the droplet movement problem to the clique partitioning problem from graph theory, the proposed method allows simultaneous movement of a large number of droplets on a microfluidic array. This in turn facilitates high-throughput applications on a pin-constrained biochip. The authors use random synthetic benchmarks and a set of multiplexed bioassays to evaluate the proposed method