Reliability-oriented broadcast electrode-addressing for pin-constrained digital microfluidic biochips

Abstract

Designs for pin-constrained digital microfluidic biochips (PDMFBs) are receiving much attention because they simplify chip fabrication and packaging, and reduce product cost. To reduce the pin count, broadcast addressing, by minimally grouping electrode sets with non-conflict signal merging, has emerged as a promising solution. Nevertheless, naive signal merging has the potential to cause excessive electrode actuations, which has been reported to have direct and adverse effect on chip reliability. According to recent studies, reliability is an important attribute for PDMFBs particularly developed for medical applications as it directly affects the final medical decision making. However, no research findings have been reported on the reliability problem in pin-constrained designs. To make PDMFBs more feasible for practical applications, we propose in this paper the first matching-based reliability-oriented broadcast-addressing algorithm for PDMFBs. We identify the factors that affect reliability and incorporate into the design-technique attributes that enhance reliability. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.