Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada.
IET Nanobiotechnol. 2011 Dec;5(4):152-60. doi: 10.1049/iet-nbt.2011.0018.
As digital microfluidics-based biochips find more applications, their complexity is expected to increase significantly owing to the trend of multiple and concurrent assays on the chip. There is a pressing need to deliver a top-down design methodology that the biochip designer can leverage the same level of computer-aided design support as the semi-conductor industry now does. Moreover, as microelectronics fabrication technology is scaling up and integrated device performance is improving, it is expected that these microfluidic biochips will be integrated with microelectronic components in next-generation system-on-chip designs. This study presents the analysis and experiments of digital microfluidic operations on a novel electrowetting-on-dielectric-based 'micro-electrode dot array architecture' that fosters a development path for hierarchical top-down design approach for digital microfluidics. The proposed architecture allows dynamic configurations and activations of identical basic microfluidic unit called 'micro-electrode cells' to design microfluidic components, layouts, routing, microfluidic operations and applications of the biochip hierarchically. Fundamental microfluidic operations have been successfully performed by the architecture. In addition, this novel architecture demonstrates a number of advantages and flexibilities over the conventional digital microfluidics in performing advanced microfluidic operations.
随着基于数字微流控的生物芯片得到越来越多的应用，由于在芯片上进行多种同时分析的趋势，其复杂性预计将显著增加。迫切需要提供一种自上而下的设计方法，使生物芯片设计师能够像半导体行业现在所做的那样，利用同样水平的计算机辅助设计支持。此外，随着微电子制造技术的不断发展和集成器件性能的不断提高，预计这些微流控生物芯片将与下一代片上系统设计中的微电子元件集成在一起。本研究分析并实验了一种新型基于电润湿的“微电极点阵列结构”上的数字微流控操作，为数字微流控的分层自顶向下设计方法提供了发展途径。所提出的架构允许对称为“微电极单元”的相同基本微流控单元进行动态配置和激活，从而分层设计微流控组件、布局、路由、微流控操作和生物芯片应用。该架构已成功执行了基本的微流控操作。此外，与传统的数字微流控相比，这种新型架构在执行高级微流控操作方面具有许多优势和灵活性。
