*Purpose*: In order to prepare certain dilution of a biochemical sample with a digital microfluidic biochip, a sequence of (1 : 1) mix-split steps is to be performed with the sample and buffer droplets. However, because of the inherent uncertaintities of fluidic operations, volumetric split-error may occur in any step of the reaction-path, and this may lead to an error in concentration of the target fluid. It is important to correct such errors during sample preparation. We have designed a simulator with which the operations of a dilution assay run on a digital microfluidic lab-on-chip can be visualized. The simulator allows the user to choose a target concentration; volumetric split-errors can be randomly injected on various mix-split steps of the reaction-path. The program outputs the resulting concentration of the target droplet.

• * An application-specific lab-on-chip simulator can be accessed from the following link.

[click here to download]

• Note:

* In the simulator, a square box represents an electrode. The on-chip sensors are indicated as red-colored electrodes, which can estimate the volume

of a droplet sitting on it;

* A circle represents a droplet;

* The users' manual for the simulator can be accessed from [here]

• *An animation that depicts the production of a target droplet with various injected errors at different mix-split steps for the target concentration 241/512, can be downloaded from the following link.

[click here to download]

• References:

1. B. B. Bhattacharya, K. Chakrabarty, S. Ghoshal, and S. Roy. 2012. High throughput and volumetric error resilient dilution with digital microfluidic based lab-on-a-chip. (2012). http://www.google.co.in/patents/ WO2012007786A1?cl=en wo Patent App. PCT/IB2010/002,895.
2. M. Ibrahim and K. Chakrabarty. 2015. Error recovery in digital microfluidics for personalized medicine. In Proceedings of Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition. 247-252.
3. H. Ren, V. Srinivasan, and R.B. Fair. 2003. Design and testing of an interpolating mixing architecture for electrowetting-based droplet-on-chip chemical dilution. In proc. of the international conference of Solid- State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems (TRANSDUCERS), Vol. 1. 619-622.
4. F. Su, S. Ozev, and K. Chakrabarty. 2006. Concurrent testing of digital microfluidics-based biochips. ACM Trans. Design Autom. Electr. Syst. (TODAES) 11, 2 (2006), 442-464.