A general-purpose field-programmable pin-constrained digital microfluidic biochip

Microfluidic biochips are VLSI solutions to automate the biochemistry operations. This technology proposes considerable improvements in terms of experiment speed, configurability and consumed experiment materials. In this paper a novel pin-constrained digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) architecture is introduced for general-purpose assay execution. The proposed DMFB enjoys cost-saving of pin-constrained designs while providing general-purpose assay execution comparable with direct-addressing DMFBs and retains the same level of functionality as previous pin-constrained designs with lower number of electrodes and in turn lower number of control pins. The experimental results show that while reducing number of electrodes and control pins we managed to achieve the same level of performance; regarding number of electrodes 20 % and 56 % improvements were obtained compared with pin-constrained and direct-addressing designs respectively. Considering number of control pins the proposed design enjoys 3 % and 572 % improvements compared with pin-constrained and direct-addressing designs, respectively. Furthermore, since the availability of various routing paths, the proposed design offers droplet-routing times comparatively lower than previous pin-constrained designs; the routing times were reduced by 17 % and 23 % compared with pin-constrained and direct-addressing designs, respectively.