Placement of Defect-Tolerant Digital Microfluidic Biochips Using the T-tree Formulation

Droplet-based microfluidic biochips have recently gained much attention and are expected to revolutionize the biological laboratory procedures. As biochips are adopted for the complex procedures in molecular biology, its complexity is expected to increase due to the need of multiple and concurrent assays on a chip. In this article, we formulate the placement problem of digital microfluidic biochips with a tree-based topological representation, called T-tree. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first work that adopts a topological representation to solve the placement problem of digital microfluidic biochips. We also consider the defect tolerant issue to avoid to use defective cells due to fabrication. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is more efficient and effective than the previous unified synthesis and placement framework.