Reliability Analysis of Mixture Preparation Using Digital Microfluidic Biochips

With the evolution of the technology, digital microfluidic (DMF) biochips have become a vital part of biochemical research. Hence, it is required to consider the reliability of the different fluidic operations performed on a biochip. Sample preparation is an important process of any real-life bioprotocol implementation on a DMF biochip. In this process, sequence of mixing and dilution steps are determined to get the desired target concentrations. The mixers used for performing mix-split steps may incorporate some noise during mixing and can result in the erroneous concentrations of the reagents. Thus, the reliability analysis of the resultant target concentration is necessary and methods are required to be developed to reduce these concentration errors. In this paper, the error and reliability models are discussed to compare the reliabilities of the existing mixing algorithms. Simulation results show that for a given target ratio, reliability of common dilution operation sharing (Liu et al., ICCAD-2013) is higher. We also discuss the mixer assignment techniques and the heuristic approach is found to quickly provide the better order of mixer assignment in order to achieve highly reliable mixture after sample preparation.