A Progressive-ILP-Based Routing Algorithm for the Synthesis of Cross-Referencing Biochips

Due to recent advances in microfluidics technology, digital microfluidic biochips and their associated computer-aided-design problems have gained much attention, most of which has been devoted to direct-addressing biochips. In this paper, we solve the droplet routing problem under the more scalable cross-referencing biochip paradigm. We propose the first droplet routing algorithm that directly solves the problem of routing. We first present an optimal basic integer-linear-programming (ILP) formulation. Due to its complexity, we also propose a progressive-ILP scheme to determine the locations of droplets at each time step. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm.