Online Synthesis for Operation Execution Time Variability on Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract—Several approaches have been proposed for the synthesis of digital microfluidic biochips, which, starting from a biochemical application and a given biochip architecture, determine the allocation, resource binding, scheduling, placement and routing of the operations in the application. Researchers have assumed that each biochemical operation in an application is characterized by a worst-case execution time (wcet). However, during the execution of the application, due to variability and randomness in biochemical reactions, operations may finish earlier than their wcets. In this paper we propose an online synthesis strategy that re-synthesizes the application at runtime when operations experience variability in their execution time, obtaining thus shorter application execution times. The proposed strategy has been evaluated using several benchmarks. I