A new technique for layout based functional testing of modules in Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Microfluidic based biochips as a composite microsystem offers an alternative platform for conventional laboratory procedures. In recent years a new generation of such lab on chip devices namely Digital Microfluidic Biochip is emerged as a suitable application for concurrent and scalable integration of multiple bioassay protocols. Dependability and accuracy are major issues for safety critical applications of DMFBs specifically in the areas of clinical diagnostics and other biochemical applications. Functional testing is targeted towards assessment of reliability of basic microfluidic operations namely merging, mixing, splitting and incubation. In this paper we proposed a layout specific functional testing method that detects faults in a prespecified group of cells already placed within a 2D array for execution of a given bioassay protocol. The objective is to minimize the test completion time, optimize test resources and customize the test for prespecified cluster of cells to be utilized as modules dedicated for microfluidic operations. The simulation is carried out on testbenches of Benchmark suite III and the results are found to be encouraging.