Low-Cost Performance-Efficient Field-Programmable Pin-Constrained Digital Microfluidic Biochip

Abstract: Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) are revolutionary biomedical devices towards diagnostics and point-of-care applications; the chips provide the capability of performing wide ranges of biochemistry and laboratory procedures, offering various opportunities among which to mention are automation, miniaturization and cost-affordability of bioassays. There have been various digital microfluidic biochips architectures; the application-specific chips are mainly suited towards executing a predefined set of bioassays whereas the more flexible general-purpose chips allow executing wide ranges of bioassays on the same architecture. Though more flexible in terms of performing various bioassays the general-purpose chips require more complicated designs compared with application-specific counterparts necessitating larger and more costly designs. This paper attempts to propose a general-purpose field-programmable pin-constrained DMFB design with improved characteristics in terms area-consumption, manufacturing cost and performance.