Co-placement optimization in sensor-reusable cyber-physical digital microfluidic biochips

Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) facilitate modern healthcare applications. One of the most important applications is point-of-care (POC) clinical diagnosis which is directly related to human health. However, biochemical experiments are usually error-prone, which makes monitoring intermediate results during bioassay execution be required to ensure the correctness of POC clinical diagnosis. To tackle this problem, cyber-physical digital microfluidic biochips with integrated sensors have been proposed and have attracted attention recently. In order to fully utilize the sensors for detection, the reusability of sensors should be taken into consideration during the module placement stage of cyber-physical DMFBs synthesis flow. Moreover, excessive actuation of electrodes may cause reliability degradation and this issuse should also be taken care of during module placement stage. In order to deal with the aforementioned problems, this paper presents the first co-optimization method for both module and sensor placement. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively minimize bioassay completion time while meeting all constraints from sensors and electrodes.