Digital-Microfluidic Biochips

D igital-micro uidic biochips (DMFBs) are revolutionizing laboratory procedures for point-of-care clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and drug discovery. DMFBs allow bioassay protocols to be scaled down to droplet size. They’re executed by enabling precise control of discrete droplets using a patterned array of electrodes. Biochemistry’s inherent complexity means that operational errors due to unbalanced splitting or protein fouling might arise during bioassay execution (see Figure 1a). Therefore, a core challenge in operating DMFBs is to verify the correctness of uidic interactions; thus, an e cient DMFB design will require careful consideration of error recovery. In “E cient Error Recovery in Cyberphysical DigitalMicro uidic Biochips” (IEEE Trans. Multi-Scale Computing Systems, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 46–58), we propose an online synthesis framework that supports error recovery in pin-constrained DMFBs and provide a comprehensive analysis of error recoverability. Given a general-purpose pinconstrained DMFB con guration connected to a real-time charge-coupled device camera system, we employed a dynamic adaptation technique to generate new schedules, placements, and droplet routes in response to errors (see Figure 1b).