Reinforcement Learning based Module Placement for Enhancing Reliability of MEDA Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Micro-electrode-dot-array (MEDA) based biochips are one of the promising new generation microfluidic biochips consisting of a sea-of-micro-electrodes with dedicated detection circuit for each microelectrode. Moreover, the ability to manipulate discrete droplets of different volumes and to route them in any direction presents MEDA biochips as an advanced microfluidic technology. Due to similarity in the working principles, the reliability issues of both MEDA biochips and digital microfluidic biochips are similar. In this paper, we propose a module placement technique for MEDA biochips to improve the reliability of biochips. Reinforcement learning based placement method (RLPM) is designed for obtaining the reliabilityaware placement of rectilinear shaped microfluidic modules. RLPM aims to minimize the area of a biochip while increasing its reliability. Simulation results confirm that on average RLPM minimizes the chip utilization area by 28.6% while enhancing the reliability of MEDA biochips compared to the state-of-the-art method.