An Efficient Capacity-based Routing Technique on MEDA-based Biochips

Abstract

Micro Electrodes Dot Array (MEDA) based biochips are emerging microdroplets handling technology that empowers supervised fluids governance on a set of microelectrodes. The MEDA-based architecture enables the dynamic routing of droplets with variable sizes for better accuracy and convenience. Efficient droplet routing with prevention of cross-contamination and maintaining all fluidic restriction is the key challenging area on the MEDA-based biochips. We use a two-stage method that involves global and detailed routing. In order to determine the route capacity of every feasible routing path for each droplet, a graph denoting the capacity has been created during the global routing phase. The proposed method assigns the priority of each net depending on the influence factors of the other nets and blockages present in the bioassay. The proposed approach enables 80% of droplet routing without any cross-contamination, based on the First Priority Movement (FPM) and Second Priority Movement (SPM) in the first stage. A capacity graph provides maximum droplets flow using FPM and finds the suitable channel to reshape the size of the droplets to avoid collision on the routing paths to accomplish 100% routing. Experimental results demonstrate that even in complex bio-assays, our proposed phase-wise router reduces 20% of the latest arrival time (T_la) and minimizes 9% average time (T_avg) by decreasing 15% of microelectrodes count compared to other routing protocols.

KEYWORDS:

• Capacity
• Digital microfluidic biochips
• Fluidic constraint
• Micro-electrode-dot-array
• Routing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The work has been supported in part by the SPARC project, Department of MHRD, Govt. of India under project code P1037.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chandan Das

Chandan Das received the BTech degree in instrumentation engineering from Haldia Institute of Technology, W.Bengal, India, in 2004. Subsequently, he completed MTech degree in instrumentation and control engineering from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India, in 2007. He received GATE scholarship during MTech. He is pursuing PhD from IIEST, Shibpur, India. His areas of interest are VLSI design, mixing and routing on digital microfluidic bio-chips, ECG signal processing, etc. Email: [email protected]

Susanta Chakraborty

Susanta Chakraborty received his bachelor's and master's degrees and PhD (Tech degree in computer science) from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India, in 1983, 1985, and 1999, respectively. His PhD research was done at the Advance Computing and Microelectronics Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He is currently a professor (HAG) with the Department of Computer Science and Technology, and the former dean (Academics) with the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology at Shibpur, Howrah, India. In 33 years of research experience, he focused on social network analysis, big data analysis and application, machine learning, synthesis and testing of the quantum circuits and VLSI circuits, cyber-physical digital microfluidic biochips and security, video image processing, gene regulatory network. He has authored around 84 research papers. He holds one patent from the international body. Two books were published by international publication Springer, Germany, in 2016 and 2017, respectively. He was a recipient of the Indian National Science Academy Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship of the Indian National Science Academy in the session 2003–2004. He was invited to the Institute of Information Technology, University of Potsdam, Germany, with the German Government Fellowship, and was a guest scientist with Prof M Gossel in 2000, and was also invited to the Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA and works have been done in collaboration with Prof J P Hays, Shannon Professor of Engineering. Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]