Design methodology for sample preparation on digital microfluidic biochips

Abstract

Recent advances in digital microfluidic biochips have led to a promising future for miniaturized laboratories, with the associated advantages of high sensitivity and reconfigurability. As one of the front-end operations on digital microfluidic biochips, sample preparation plays an important role in biochemical assays and applications. For fast and high-throughput biochemical applications, it is critical to develop an automated design methodology for sample preparation. Prior work in this area does not provide solutions to the problem of design automation for sample preparation. Moreover, it is critical to ensure the correctness of droplets and recover from errors efficiently during sample preparation. Published work on error recovery is inefficient and impractical for sample preparation. Therefore, in this paper, we present an automated design methodology for sample preparation, including architectural synthesis, layout synthesis, and dynamic error recovery. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on real-life biochemical applications to demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency. Compared to prior work, the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 48.39% reduction in sample preparation time.