Abstract:
Droplet-based “digital” microfluidics technology has
now come of age and software-controlled biochips for healthcare
applications are starting to emerge. However, today’s digital
microfluidic biochips suffer from the drawback that there is no
feedback to the control software from the underlying hardware
platform. Due to the lack of precision inherent in biochemical
experiments, errors are likely during droplet manipulation, but
error recovery based on the repetition of experiments leads to
wastage of expensive reagents and hard-to-prepare samples. By
exploiting recent advances in the integration of optical detectors
(sensors) in a digital microfluidics biochip, we present a “physicalaware”
system reconfiguration technique that uses sensor data at
intermediate checkpoints to dynamically reconfigure the biochip.
A cyberphysical re-synthesis technique is used to recompute
electrode-actuation sequences, thereby deriving new schedules,
module placement, and droplet routing pathways, with minimum
impact on the time-to-response.
