Droplet-routing-aware module placement for cross-referencing biochips

Digital Microfluidic Biochip (DMFB) is a revolutionary technology for performing lab-on-a-chip experiments. Comparing to traditional direct-addressing design of DMFB, Cross-Referencing Biochip is a flexible design which not only helps to reduce pin number on chip but also brings down manufacturing cost. Following the generally accepted DMFB top-down design methodology, namely task scheduling, resource binding, module placement, droplet routing, previous works that focus on cross-referencing biochip routing are all based on the placement result generated for direct-addressing biochip. In this paper, we present an ILP-based placement method that first utilizes the property of cross-referencing for the purpose of optimizing routing. Furthermore, one previously ignored electrode interference problem on modules (blocks) is addressed in this paper. Real-life bioassay protocol based benchmarks are used to evaluate the proposed method. Experimental results show that the placement result generated by our placer yields better routing result comparing with those from placer for direct-addressing DMFB.