Defect-oriented testing and diagnosis for digital microfluidics-based biochips

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.