A Pattern-Control Digital Microfluidic Bio-Chip for Fast Thermal Cycle in Nucleic Acid Amplification Tests

A pattern-control digital biochip is proposed for fast medical tests. With integrated circuit modules in each basic element, also known as micro-electrode, this biochip can achieve digital microfluidic operations, capacitive sensing, and thermal cycle via different control patterns. As a result, bio-protocols can be derived from target biomedical tests to reach better test accuracy on the proposed chip. For the mentioned fast medical tests, samples/reagents can be identified first by capacitive sensing, followed by microfluidic and thermal cycle operations. Preliminary measurements show that heating/cooling rate of 5°C/sec can be achieved and demonstrate each thermal cycle (95→55→72) for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) can be completed in less than 20 seconds with power consumption of 256-444 uW per micro-electrode while dealing with nano-liter samples. This implies both test time and power consumption per sample test can be further improved, making our proposed biochip very suitable for point-of-care test (POCT) applications.