Open-Source Incubation Ecosystem for Digital Microfluidics — Status and Roadmap: Invited Paper

Electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) is a mechanism that allows physical handling of liquids with only electrical signals, such as digitizing a liquid into tiny droplets and manipulating them on a chip, thus enabling “digital microfluidics”. As an elegantly simple platform free of pumps or valves, EWOD digital microfluidics has been attracting high research interest in the past two decades and has recently been transitioned to a few commercial products in displays and biochemistry. However, the number of labs utilizing this technology is still small, due to the difficulty in translating design intent to manufactured devices. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a cloud-based open-source EWOD cybermanufacturing ecosystem that enables an automatic translation from user requirements to manufactured digital microfluidics. The incubation cyber ecosystem is to be accessible to a wide range of end users, allowing researchers, entrepreneurs, students, and hobbyists alike to focus on their own ideas and applications without having to master the subtleties of EWOD engineering and manufacturing. This can be thought of as an “operating system” for EWOD community, similar to Windows and macOS for people with no computer hardware background. The proposed cyber ecosystem aims to ease the process of designing and eliminate the burden of fabricating EWOD chips so that the user pool is increased and more applications found for EWOD digital microfluidics.