Shape-Dependent Velocity Based Droplet Routing on MEDA Biochips
Chiharu Shiro, Hiroki Nishikawa, Xiangbo Kong, Hiroyuki Tomiyama, Shigeru Yamashita, Sudip Roy
Abstract
Digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) has attracted attention in the biochemical and medical industries. In particular, a microelectrode dot array (MEDA) biochip, which is composed of a two-dimensional microelectrode array, enables to realize fine-grained manipulation such as dilution, mixing, sensing, and so on in real-time. Unlike existing DMFB biochips, a MEDA architecture allows microelectrodes to control a certain volume of droplet in a fine-grained manner and can vary droplet volume and shape in such a way that it efficiently conducts synthesis and manipulation of droplets. There have been many works in order to improve the efficiency of synthesis of MEDA biochips; however, the synthesis, especially droplet routing, has never considered the shape-dependent velocity of droplets. In this paper, we propose the droplet routing techniques for MEDA biochips with shape-dependent velocity of droplets. The proposed techniques take the advantage of variant velocities of droplets dependent on the shapes and aim to reduce the overall routing time of a droplet from a source to a destination. Simulation results confirm that the proposed techniques can shorten the routing time by 80% compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.