A General Purpose Field-Programmable Digital Microfluidic Biochip with Scannable Electrofluidic Control

Applications of digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) are ever increasing. Most of today's research is focused on designing a cost-effective DMFB that does not compromise the flexibility offered by individually addressable electrodes. Flexible DMFB architectures that use individual addressing have high I/O pin demands which drive the cost. Pin-constrained designs, though reduce the I/O pin count, make the DMFBs assay-specific rather than general purpose requiring the fabrication of specialized DMFBs for each assay. This negated the cost savings brought about by reduction in pin count. Our proposed DMFB architecture utilizes pin-constrained design techniques on top of scan-chain-based electrode control to realize a highly flexible and customizable general purpose field-programmable array with very few I/O pins. Experimental results show a pin reduction of 65x with respect to the direct addressable arrays and 5.7x in comparison to the field-programmable pin-constrained DMFBs. An analysis of the assay execution time show that assays run up to 40 % faster on our architecture in comparison to the state-of-the-art pin-constrained design of comparable size.