Advancement with digital microfluidic biochips towards sustainability and secured outcome: a comprehensive survey on specific design metrics

Abstract

Digital Microfluidic Biochips belong to the emerging technologies in healthcare as they provide bioassay results with high precision while demanding very little amount of samples, space, and cost. To lessen resource-cost burden on this highly effective platform, pin-constrained biochips with broadcast pin addressing technique and cross-referencing biochips have attained the highest popularity among all since they demand a reduced number of pins. However, biochips that use clique-partitioning based broadcast addressing scheme suffer from many reliability, design, and security related issues. Another important pin count reduction method is cross-referencing, which also inherently possesses several design issues. In recent years, MEDA biochips have become vastly popular due to its capability of handling variable sized droplets and fine-grained droplet sensing. MEDA biochips also face several reliability and security issues. In this survey, we have included all state-of-the-art design opportunities, challenges, and the methods dealing with the reliability and security issues of broadcast addressing, MEDA, and direct addressing biochips. The comparison between the pin reduction schemes is also depicted. Finally, the possible future directions and research openings are provided.