A Cost & Performance-Efficient Field-Programmable Pin-Constrained Digital Microfluidic Biochip

TL;DR

This paper introduces a general-purpose digital microfluidic biochip that reduces manufacturing costs and maintains competitive performance, advancing affordable Lab-on-Chip technology for biochemical applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel DMFB architecture optimized for cost-efficiency and performance, outperforming existing designs in manufacturing affordability.

Findings

Lower layout and PCB fabrication costs compared to state-of-the-art DMFBs

Maintains competitive performance despite cost reductions

Suitable for diverse biochemical laboratory procedures

Abstract

Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) constitute modern generation of Lab-on-Chip (LoC) devices aimed at automation, miniaturization and cost-affordability of biochemistry and laboratory procedures. Over the course of past few years there have been various application-specific and general-purpose DMFBs aimed at reduced manufacturing costs; following the same trend this study presents a general-purpose DMFB with highly competitive characteristics compared with the state-of-the-art DMFBs. The proposed DMFB architecture provides lower Layout / PCB fabrication costs thereby reducing the total manufacturing costs. While more cost-affordable the proposed design is competitive with the state-of-the-art DMFB architectures.