No abstract

Digital microfluidics is a lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technology used to actuate small amounts of liquids on an array of individually addressable electrodes. Microliter sized droplets can be programmatically dispensed, moved, mixed, split, in a controlled environment which combined with miniaturized sensing techniques makes LOC suitable for a broad range of applications in the field of medical diagnostics and synthetic biology. Furthermore, a programmable digital microfluidics platform holds the potential to add a "fluidic subsystem" to the classical computation model thus opening the doors for cyber-physical bio-processors. To facilitate the programming and operation of such bio-fluidic computing, we propose dedicated instruction set architecture and virtual machine. A set of digital microfluidic core instructions as well as classic computing operations are executed on a virtual machine, which decouples the protocol execution from the LOC functionality.