Low-Cost Performance-Efficient Field-Programmable Pin-Constrained Digital Microfluidic Biochip

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cost-effective, performance-efficient, and flexible field-programmable digital microfluidic biochip design that reduces area and manufacturing costs while supporting a wide range of bioassays.

Contribution

It proposes a novel general-purpose, pin-constrained DMFB architecture that improves area, cost, and performance over existing designs.

Findings

Reduced chip area compared to traditional designs

Lower manufacturing costs achieved

Maintains high performance for diverse bioassays

Abstract

Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) are revolutionary biomedical devices towards diagnostics and point-of-care applications; the chips provide the capability of performing wide ranges of biochemistry and laboratory procedures, offering various opportunities among which to mention are automation, miniaturization and cost-affordability of bioassays. There have been various digital microfluidic biochips architectures; the application-specific chips are mainly suited towards executing a predefined set of bioassays whereas the more flexible general-purpose chips allow executing wide ranges of bioassays on the same architecture. Though more flexible in terms of performing various bioassays the general-purpose chips require more complicated designs compared with application-specific counterparts necessitating larger and more costly designs. This paper attempts to propose a general-purpose field-programmable pin-constrained DMFB design with improved characteristics in terms area-consumption, manufacturing cost and performance.