Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) are attractive instruments for obtaining modern molecular biology and chemical measurements. Due to the increasingly complex measurements carried out on a DMFB, such chips are more prone to failure. To compensate for the shortcomings of the module-based DMFB, this paper proposes a routing-based fault repair method. The routing-based synthesis methodology ensures a much higher chip utilization factor by removing the virtual modules on the chip, as well as removing the extra electrodes needed as guard cells. In this paper, the routing problem is identified as a dynamic path-planning problem and mixed path design problem under certain constraints, and an improved Dijkstra and improved particle swarm optimization (ID-IPSO) algorithm is proposed. By introducing a cost function into the Dijkstra algorithm, the path-planning problem under dynamic obstacles is solved, and the problem of mixed path design is solved by redefining the position and velocity vectors of the particle swarm optimization. The ID-IPSO routing-based fault repair method is applied to a multibody fluid detection experiment. The proposed design method has a stronger optimization ability than the greedy algorithm. The algorithm is applied to 8×9, 8×8, and 7×8 fault-free chips. The proposed ID-IPSO routing-based chip design method saves 13.9%, 14.3%, and 14.5% of the experiment completion time compared with the greedy algorithm. Compared with a modular fault repair method based on the genetic algorithm, the ID-IPSO routing-based fault repair method has greater advantages and can save 39.3% of the completion time on average in the completion of complex experiments. When the ratio of faulty electrodes is less than 12% and 23%, the modular and ID-IPSO routing-based fault repair methods, respectively, can guarantee a 100% failure repair rate. The utilization rate of the electrodes is 18% higher than that of the modular method, and the average electrode usage time is 17%. Therefore, the ID-IPSO routing-based fault repair method can accommodate more faulty electrodes for the same fault repair rate; the experiment completion time is shorter, the average number of electrodes is lower, and the security performance is better.

No abstract

With the continuous application and development of digital microfluidic technology in various fields, many researchers have studied the design of digital microfluidic chips. Module-based chip design methods greatly simplify the...

Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) are increasingly important and are used for point-ofcare, drug discovery, clinical diagnosis, immunoassays, etc. Pin-constrained DMFBs are an important part of digital microfluidic biochips, and they have gained increasing attention from researchers. However, many previous works have focused on the problem of electrode addressing and aimed to minimize the number of control pins in pin-constrained DMFBs. Although the number of control pins can be effectively redistributed through broadcast addressing technology, the chip reliability will be reduced if the signals are shared arbitrarily. Arbitrary signal sharing can lead to a large number of actuations for many idle electrodes, and as a result, a trapping charge or decreasing contact angle problem could occur for some electrodes, reducing the reliability of the chip. To address this problem, the appropriate electrode matching object should be carefully selected, and the influence of these factors on chip reliability should be fully considered. For this purpose, we aimed to fully consider electrode addressing and the reliability of the chip in improving the reliability of DMFBs. This paper proposed a pin addressing method based on a support vector machine (SVM) with the reliability constraint algorithm, which can fully consider the electrode addressing method and the reliability of the chip together. The proposed method achieved an average maximum number of electrode actuations that was 53.8% and 18.2% smaller than those of the baseline algorithm and the graph-based algorithm, respectively. The simulation experiment results showed that the proposed method can efficiently solve reliability problems during the DMFB design process.

No abstract