Droplet-Aware Module-Based Synthesis for Fault-Tolerant Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Microfluidic biochips are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers, and are able to integrate on-chip all the basic functions for biochemical analysis. On a “digital” biochip liquids are manipulated as discrete droplets on a two-dimensional microfluidic array of electrodes. Basic operations, such as mixing and dilution, are performed on the array, by routing the corresponding droplets on a group of electrodes, forming a virtual device.

Initially researchers have ignored the locations of droplets during operation execution, and have considered that all electrodes inside devices are occupied.We have recently proposed a droplet-aware approach for the execution of operations on the microfluidic array, in which the locations of droplets inside devices are known at each time step.

In this article we extend the droplet-aware approach to consider the synthesis of biochips which contain defective electrodes on the microfluidic array. We show that for such biochips knowing the exact locations of droplets during operation execution leads to significant improvements in the completion time of applications.