Effects of Cell Shapes on the Routability of Digital Microfluidic Biochips
Leonard Schneider1, Oliver Keszocze1,2, Jannis Stoppe1,2 and Rolf Drechsler1,2
1Institute of Computer Science, University of Bremen, 28359 Bremen, Germany.
aleoscn@informatik.uni-bremen.de
bkeszocze@informatik.uni-bremen.de
cjstoppe@informatik.uni-bremen.de
ddrechsle@informatik.uni-bremen.de
2Cyber Physical Systems, DFKI GmbH, 28359 Bremen, Germany
ABSTRACT
Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) are an emerging technology promising a high degree of automation in laboratory procedures by means of manipulating small discretized amounts of fluids. A crucial part in conducting experiments on biochips is the routing of discretized droplets. While doing so, droplets must not enter each others' interference region to avoid unintended mixing. This leads to cells in the proximity of the droplet being impassable for others. For different cell shapes, the effect of these temporary blockages varies as the adjacency of cells changes with their shapes. Yet, no evaluation with respect to routability in relation to cell shapes has been conducted so far. This paper analyses and compares various tessellations for the field of cells. Routing benchmarks are mapped to these and the results are compared in order to determine if and how cell shapes affect the performance of DMFBs, showing that certain cell shapes are superior to others.
