| Title | Sequence-Pair-Based Placement and Routing for Flow-Based Microfluidic Biochips |
| Author | *Qin Wang, Yizhong Ru, Hailong Yao (Tsinghua University, China), Tsung-Yi Ho (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan), Yici Cai (Tsinghua University, China) |
| Page | pp. 587 - 592 |
| Keyword | Flow-based microfluidic biochips, Sequence-pair-based placement, Flow-channel crossings avoidance, Placement adjustment |
| Abstract | Flow-based microfluidic biochips are attracting increasing attention
with successful applications in lab-on-a-chip experiments and
point-of-care diagnosis. Physical design for flow-based biochips
determines the number of flow-channel intersections, and thus
affects the number of microvalves. As reducing microvalves will
significantly improve the overall design quality and reliability,
physical design is of great importance. Typically, physical design
consists of two major stages, i.e., component placement and
routing. Existing works follow the step-by-step scheme, which
perform placement and routing separately. The lack of interactions
between the two design stages results in degraded design with
large number of unfavorable channel intersections and microvalves.
This paper presents a novel placement and routing method based
on the sequence-pair representation, which seamlessly integrates
placement and routing stages and allows iterative placement adjustment
upon routing feedbacks. Experimental results show that
compared with the existing work, the proposed method obtains
average 54.10% improvement in flow-channel crossings, 42.15%
improvement in total chip area, and 23.43% improvement in total
channel length. |
| Title | Congestion- and Timing-Driven Droplet Routing for Pin-Constrained Paper-Based Microfluidic Biochips |
| Author | *Jain-De Li, Sying-Jyan Wang (National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan), Katherine Shu-Min Li (National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan), Tsung-Yi Ho (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) |
| Page | pp. 593 - 598 |
| Keyword | Paper-based Digital Microfluidic (PB-DMF), Digital Microfluidic, Global Routing, Escape Routing |
| Abstract | Paper-based microfluidic chips provide a novel way to carry out microfluidic analysis. Such chips achieve “lab-on-paper” instead of traditional “lab-on-chips”. The paper substrate is attractive because it is cost-effective, easy to use and disposable. The routing problem of paper-based digital microfluidic (PB-DMF) biochips is to realize bio-chemical operations on paper with inkjet printing techniques. In this paper, we propose a routing scheme targeting multiple preprogrammed droplet paths such that both routability and wire-length are optimized in a paper layer. Compared with previous digital microfluidic (DMF), the proposed paper-based DMF needs only one integrated paper layer instead of two layers of control and signal layers in the traditional DMF. Experimental results on a set of paper chip applications show the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of the proposed algorithm. |
| Title | Chain-Based Pin Count Minimization for General-Purpose Digital Microfluidic Biochips |
| Author | *Yung-Chun Lei, Chen-Shing Hsu, Juinn-Dar Huang (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan), Jing-Yang Jou (National Central University, Taiwan) |
| Page | pp. 599 - 604 |
| Keyword | Digital microfluidic biochip, pin count minimization, Lab on a chip |
| Abstract | Minimizing the number of external control pins is one of the most important optimization objectives in digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) design especially as the chip size gets even bigger. So far, only few works focus on this issue for general-purpose DMFBs. In this paper, we present a pin count minimization algorithm based on sophisticated electrode chaining on regular or irregular electrode arrays. The key idea of the proposed method is that actuation information can be implied from previous neighborhood electrodes to later ones throughout the chain. Experimental results show that the pin count reduction can be near 50% in large DMFBs. |
| Title | A Routability-Driven Flow Routing Algorithm for Programmable Microfluidic Devices |
| Author | Yi-Siang Su (National Taiwan University, Taiwan), *Tsung-Yi Ho (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan), Der-Tsai Lee (National Taiwan University, Taiwan) |
| Page | pp. 605 - 610 |
| Keyword | Biochip, Microfluidics, Routing |
| Abstract | Biochips that are made of Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are concerned by everyone in recent years. The advantages of biochips are high accuracy and fast reaction rate with only a small volume consumption of samples and reagents. Among various types of biochips,
flow-based microfluidic biochips receive much attention recently, especially the programmable microfluidic device (PMD). PMDs are capable of performing multitude functions in one platform without requiring any hardware modifications. As the size of chips increase,
ow routing becomes more complicated. Traditional method to manually control multiple flows is inefficient and it may not have feasible assay completion time. Fortunately, PMDs has high potential to
route flows with pure software programs to overcome the drawbacks of traditional methods. However, naive software program that simply minimizing assay completion time may cause flow-congestion problems and unexpected mixing between different assays. To conduct a viable experiment, a feasible program should not only minimize assay completion time but also consider congestion problems and fluidic constraint. Therefore, we formulate the flow routing problem and propose a routability-driven flow routing algorithm which considers the fluidic constraint and minimizes the assay completion time on PMDs. |