Operation placement for application-specific digital microfluidic biochips

Microfluidic-based biochips are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers, and are able to integrate onchip all the necessary functions for biochemical analysis using microfluidics. The digital microfluidic biochips are based on the manipulation of liquids not as a continuous flow, but as discrete droplets on an array of electrodes.

Microfluidic operations, such as transport, mixing, split, are performed on this array by routing the corresponding droplets on a series of electrodes. Researchers have proposed several approaches for the synthesis of digital microfluidic biochips. All previous work assumes that the biochip architecture is given, and consider a rectangular shape for the electrode array.

However, non-regular application-specific architectures are common in practice. In this paper, we are interested in determining a placement of operations for application-specific biochips, such that the application completion time is minimized. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated using several benchmarks.