Real-Time Error Recovery in Cyberphysical Digital-Microfluidic Biochips Using a Compact Dictionary

A cyberphysical digital microfluidics system is an emerging technology that enables the integration of fluid-handling operations, reaction-outcome detection, and automated error recovery on a biochip. Cyberphysical biochip systems studied thus far suffer from a significant increase in reaction time for error recovery. We present a hardware-assisted method that can be implemented in real-time on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). In order to store the error dictionary in the limited memory available in the FPGA, we utilize and adapt two data compaction techniques from the literature. We use four laboratorial protocols to demonstrate that, compared to software-based methods, the proposed dictionary-based error-recovery method has low response time, and requires a simple experimental setup, and only a small amount of memory.