Higher Flexibililty of Reconfigurable Digital Micro/Nano Fluidic Biochips using an FPGA-Inspired Architecture

Significant improvements in bio-technology and bio-engineering have composed wonderful opportunities to understand and manipulate the bio-structures. Biochips are known as electronic platform for automating the bio-chemical operations in order to decrease time, cost and increase flexibility of operations. Digital micro/nano fluidic biochips are two dimensional arrays of controllable electrodes that can convey droplets around the chip to perform the assays. Each electrode is controlled via an external pins and decreasing the number of pins is very critical in feasibility of biochip construction. In this paper, a new FPGA-inspired architecture is proposed for micro-fluidic biochips in order to create the ability for configurability to improve the flexibility of biochip and reduce the number of controlling pins. Our simulations show that in the new architecture, number of required pins is improved 6.35x rather to than direct addressing method Griffith (2005) and total experiment time is reduced by 34% with higher level of configurability, flexibility.