A new look ahead technique for customized testing in digital microfluidic biochips

Abstract

Digital Micro fluidic biochips have been developed as a promising platform for Lab-on-chip systems that manipulate individual droplet of chemicals on a 2D planar array of electrodes. Due to the significance of the correctness of the results - fault tolerance and dependability becomes a major issue for operation of these devices. Therefore, such devices are required to be tested frequently both off-line (e.g., post manufacturing) and concurrently ahead of each assay execution. Under both scenarios, testing is accomplished by routing one or more test droplets across the chip simultaneously and recording their arrival at the destination. In this paper we attempted to solve the problem of customized testing for a given Bioassay layout. We have applied a look ahead strategy for parallel testing using multiple droplets for any given test bench with an objective of minimization of test completion time and optimized utilization of test resources. The test simulations are carried out on test benches of Benchmark suite III and results obtained are found to be encouraging. © 2012 IEEE.