Module-Based Compilation with Droplet-Aware Operation Execution

Abstract

The compilation problems discussed so far have assumed that during operation execution in module-based compilation, the droplet repeatedly follows the same pattern inside the virtual module, leading to an operation completion time determined through experiments. The actual position of the droplet inside the virtual device has been ignored, considering that all the electrodes forming the device are occupied throughout the operation execution. In order to avoid the accidental merging of droplets, it was considered that a device is surrounded by a 1-cell segregation area, containing cells that can not be used until the operation performing on the device is completed. In this chapter, we consider rectangular modules (which we also call “black-box modules”), but in contrast to earlier chapters we use a droplet-aware execution of microfluidic operations, which means that we know the exact position of droplets inside the modules at each time step, and we can control them to avoid accidental merging, if necessary. This allows us to utilize the chip area better, since no segregation cells are needed to separate the modules, and improve the routing step, since now the routes can cross over modules, if needed. Another advantage of droplet-aware operation execution, is that it allows the partial overlapping of modules, which can increase parallelism. The proposed compilation solution extends the Tabu Search-based compilation introduced in the earlier chapters.