A Group-Preferential Parallel-Routing Algorithm for Cross-Referencing Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Present day Cross-referencing Biochip Technology for Digital Micro fluidic biochips (DMFB) scales down the number of pins per chip drastically, thereby reducing the costs of manufacturing and testing. However the issue of electrode interference poses a hard problem for simultaneous routing of droplets in cross-referencing biochips. In this paper we attempted to resolve the problem by the use of a preferential grouping scheme to group a series of source droplets placed in the same row or same column and route each group simultaneously with priority-based stalling for intelligent collision avoidance. The objectives of the proposed method are to minimize: (i) latest arrival time, (ii) number of pins to be used and (iii) total cell utilization. The algorithm is implemented using Benchmark Suite II and the results obtained are quite encouraging.