Testing microelectronic biofluidic systems

According to the 2005 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, the integration of emerging nondigital CMOS technologies will require radically different test methods, posing a major challenge for designers and test engineers. One such technology is microelectronic fluidic (MEF) arrays, which have rapidly gained importance in many biological, pharmaceutical, and industrial applications. The advantages of these systems, such as operation speed, use of very small amounts of liquid, on-board droplet detection, signal conditioning, and vast digital signal processing, make them very promising. However, testable design of these devices in a mass-production environment is still in its infancy, hampering their low-cost introduction to the market. This article describes analog and digital MEF design and testing method

A droplet routing technique for fault-tolerant digital microfluidic devices

Abstract—Efficient droplet routing is one of the key approaches for realizing fault-tolerant microfluidic biochips. It requires that run-time diagnosis and fault recovery can be made possible in such systems. This paper describes a droplet routing technique for a fault-tolerant digital microfluidic platform. This technique features handling of many microfluidic operations simultaneously and uses on-chip sensors for diagnosis at run-time.\ud Once a fault is detected during the droplet routing, recovery procedures will be started-up immediately. Faulty units on the chip will be marked and isolated from the array so that the remaining droplets can still be routed along a fault-free path to their destinations. This method guarantees a non-stop fault-tolerant operation for very large microfluidic arrays.\u

Yield Enhancement of Digital Microfluidics-Based Biochips Using Space Redundancy and Local Reconfiguration

As microfluidics-based biochips become more complex, manufacturing yield will have significant influence on production volume and product cost. We propose an interstitial redundancy approach to enhance the yield of biochips that are based on droplet-based microfluidics. In this design method, spare cells are placed in the interstitial sites within the microfluidic array, and they replace neighboring faulty cells via local reconfiguration. The proposed design method is evaluated using a set of concurrent real-life bioassays.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDAA (http://www.edaa.com/

Fault Modeling and Defect Analysis on Digital Microfluidics Based Biochips

An emerging technology Digital Microfluidics Biochips, an integrating concept of electronics and biology is anticipated to play an important role in the area of medical diagnostics, drug discovery, DNA sequencing, toxicity supervising and other bio-chemical applications. This bio-microelectromechanical system is supposed to have defects if it fails to accomplish the specified assignment dedicated to it. This paper focuses on different possible cases responsible for the misbehavior of the bio-MEMS

Synthesis of biochemical applications on digital microfluidic biochips with operation variability

Abstract—Microfluidic-based biochips are replacing the con-ventional biochemical analyzers, and are able to integrate on-chip all the necessary functions for biochemical analysis using microfluidics. The digital microfluidic biochips are based on the manipulation of liquids not as a continuous flow, but as discrete droplets. Researchers have presented approaches for the synthesis of digital microfluidic biochips, which, starting from a biochemical application and a given biochip architecture, determine the allocation, resource binding, scheduling and place-ment of the operations in the application. Existing approaches consider that on-chip operations, such as splitting a droplet of liquid, are perfect. However, these operations have variability margins, which can impact the correctness of the biochemical application. We consider that a split operation, which goes beyond specified variability bounds, is faulty. The fault is detected using on-chip volume sensors. We have proposed an abstract model for a biochemical application, consisting of a sequencing graph, which can capture all the fault scenarios in the application. Starting from this model, we have proposed a synthesis approach that, for a given chip area and number of sensors, can derive a fault-tolerant implementation. Two fault-tolerant scheduling techniques have been proposed and compared. We show that, by taking into account fault-occurrence information, we can derive better quality implementations, which leads to shorter application completion times, even in the case of faults. The proposed synthesis approach under operation variability has been evaluated using several benchmarks. I