SOAER: Self-Obstacle Avoiding Escape Routing for Paper-Based Digital Microfluidic Biochips

In paper-based digital microfluidic biochips (P-DMFBs), conductive electrodes and control lines are printed on the same side of the photo paper, which introduces a critical design challenge on the so-called control interference issue. This introduces a distinct escape routing problem, named Self-Obstacle Avoiding Escape Routing (SOAER). In the SOAER problem, each electrode has a specific set of routing obstacles of its own, which are forbidden to be crossed over by the control line of the electrode. Based on an enhanced network flow model, this paper proposes an effective SOAER routing method for P-DMFBs. Experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art method, SOAER obtains 49x speedup in runtime. Our proposed method also shows the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall system. The success rate is up to 100% and the runtime is decreased significantly.