BioRoute: a network-flow based routing algorithm for digital microfluidic biochips

Due to the recent advances in microfluidics, digital microfluidic biochips are expected to revolutionize laboratory procedures. One critical problem for biochip synthesis is the droplet routing problem. Unlike traditional VLSI routing problems, in addition to routing path selection, the biochip routing problem needs to address the issue of scheduling droplets under the practical constraints imposed by the fluidic property and the timing restriction of the synthesis result. In this paper, we present the first network-flow based routing algorithm that can concurrently route a set of non-interfering nets for the droplet routing problem on biochips. We adopt a two-stage technique of global routing followed by detailed routing. In global routing, we first identify a set of non-interfering nets and then adopt the network-flow approach to generate optimal global-routing paths for the nets. In detailed routing, we present the first polynomialtime algorithm for simultaneous routing and scheduli...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Ping-Hung Yuh, Chia-Lin Yang, Yao-Wen Chang
• Keywords: Droplet Routing Problem, Global Routing, Hardware, ICCAD 2007, Routing