Reliability-Driven Pipelined Scan-Like Testing of Digital Microfluidic Biochips

A digital micro fluidic biochip (DMFB) is an attractive platform for immunoassays, point-of-care clinical diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and other laboratory procedures in biochemistry. Effective testing methods are required to ensure robust DMFB operation and high confidence in the outcome of biochemical experiments. Prior work on DMFB testing does not address the problem of designing the test to minimize reliability degradation during test application. It also ignores physical constraints arising from fluidic behavior and the physics of electro wetting-on-dielectric. We develop a practical and realistic testing method by first systematically analyzing the influence of actuation voltage and actuation frequency on the distribution of the electric field, and its resulting effect on dielectric degradation. Next, we use this analysis to choose appropriate parameter settings for testing, and proposes a new pipelined scan-like testing method. Both static and dynamic fluidic constraints are considered in the new testing method, and a diagnosis technique is presented to easily locate defects. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed testing approach in minimizing test-completion time.