One-pass Synthesis for Digital Microfluidic Biochips: A Survey

With the advances of the microfluidic technology, the design of Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) received significant attention in the recent past. The corresponding design process usually consists of multiple, consecutive design tasks, namely binding, scheduling, placement, and routing. These tasks, however, are often considered and solved separately. This can lead to design gaps between the individual steps, yielding less-than-optimal overall solutions or prevent to solve the next step altogether. In order to address these shortcomings, the concept of one-pass synthesis for DMFBs has been introduced. In this survey paper, we review the main ideas of this concept and provide an overview on two different implementations of it: (1) an exact, SAT-based approach which guarantees optimal solutions with respect to area and/or timing and (2) a heuristic graph-based approach which focuses on run-time efficiency. We discuss the (dis-)advantages of those approaches with respect to their quality as well as scalability and illustrate them on various benchmark assays.