Design and implementation of a microfluidic half adder chip based on double-stranded DNA

In recent years, DNA computing has gained significant research interest. The design of a biochip with DNA computing as a carrier has become a key area in the development of a DNA molecular computer. The half adder, as the basic unit of various arithmetic units, has a complex structure that directly affects the overall complexity of a computer's structure. In this study, a half adder on a microfluidic chip is developed by means of bio-reaction. This technology is combined with a biochip and adopts glass and polydimethylsiloxane to fabricate a microscale hybrid chip. Using a DNA strand as an operand, realization of the half adder on a microfluidic chip is achieved by controlling the annealing and denaturation of double-stranded DNA. The computing results are rapidly and accurately obtained by detecting the presence of double-stranded DNA in a solution by agarose gel electrophoresis. The microfluidic half-adder chip accurately realizes half-adder computations and overcomes the shortcomings of traditional integrated circuit half adders, optical half adders, and chemical molecule half adders, such as complex structure, limited component size, and low accuracy.