Dictionary-based error recovery in cyberphysical digital-microfluidic biochips

A cyberphysical digital microfluidics system is an emerging technology that enables the integration of fluid-handling operations, reaction-outcome detection, and automated error recovery on a biochip. The cyberphysical biochip system studied thus far suffers from the limitation of a significant increase in reaction time for error recovery. We present a hardware-assisted error-recovery method that relies on an error dictionary for rapid error recovery. The error-recovery procedure and dynamic resynthesis of a reaction, which is especially attractive for flash chemistry, can be implemented in realtime on a single-board microcontroller. In order to store the error dictionary in the limited memory available in the low-cost microcontroller, we describe two compaction techniques. We use three laboratorial protocols to demonstrate that, compared to software-based methods, the proposed dictionary-based error-recovery method has less impact on response time, and requires simple experimental setup, and only a small amount of memory.