A Test Droplets Dispensing Solution for Digital Microfluidic Biochip Parallel Testing

Abstract

Digital microfluidic Biochips are widely used on safety-critical biomedical applications, and dependability is an essential attribute for them. To reduce dispensing time, a new test droplets dispensing solution for digital microfluidic biochip parallel testing is proposed in the paper, where multiple test droplets are allotted to the limited test dispensing sources to transmit them to the corresponding test target. The goal is minimizing the dispensing time, and then reduces the system testing time. Even thought the problem is shown to be NP-complete, it can be solved exactly for practical instances using integer linear programming (ILP). The experimental results demonstrate that optimal solutions to the test droplets dispensing problem in microfluidic biochip parallel testing are indeed feasible.