Testing and Diagnosis of Realistic Defects in Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Abstract. Microfluidics-based biochips are soon expected to revolutionize biosensing, clinical diagnostics and drug discovery. Robust off-line and on-line test techniques are required to ensure system dependability as these biochips are deployed for safety-critical applications. Due to the underlying mixed-technology and mixed-energy domains, biochips exhibit unique failure mechanisms and defects. We first relate some realistic defects to fault models and observable errors. We next set up an experiment to evaluate the manifestations of electrode-short faults. Motivated by the experimental results, we present a testing and diagnosis methodology to detect catastrophic faults and locate faulty regions. The proposed method is evaluated using a biochip performing real-life multiplexed bioassays.

Single Fault Detection and Diagnosis Technique for Digital Micro-Fluidic Based Biochips

“…In digital micro-fluidic biochips, the liquids are divided into discrete and distinctly controllable manipulated microliter-nanolitre (the volume of the droplets) droplets, traverse on a two dimensional array, based on the principle of electro wetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) [1,3,9].…”

“…The fundamental unit cell of a EWOD based digital micro-fluidic biochip composed of two parallel glass plates, as shown in Figure. 1 [9]. The top plate is implicated with a continuous ground electrode and the bottom plate holds a patterned array of electrodes.…”

Design Automation and Test Solutions for Digital Microfluidic Biochips

“…Therefore, to detect such faults, it is not enough to solve only the Hamiltonian path problem. In [46], a solution based on Euler paths in graphs is described for detecting electrode shorts.…”

A Novel Double Fault Diagnosis and Detection Technique in Digital Microfluidic Biochips

“…Microfluidic biochips have been characterized for the detection of faults [4], [5], [6], [7]. The test planning problem was formulated in terms of Euler circuit in [6], [7].…”

“…The test planning problem was formulated in terms of Euler circuit in [6], [7]. In [8], a functional testing has been proposed, referring to [4], [10], [11] that targets the functional operations of the microfluidic modules.…”