Shape-Dependent Velocity Based Droplet Routing on MEDA Biochips

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.