On testing of MEDA based digital microfluidics biochips

Recent years have seen rapid progress in using digital microfluidics based biochips for biomedical assays. The testing and reliability of these biochips is crucial when they are used in point-of-care diagnostics applications. As the scalability and complexity of biomedical assays increases, there is a need for efficient testing methodologies to ensure reliability of these biochips. The conventional testing methodologies will not be sufficient for the recently proposed and highly scalable Micro-electrode-dot array (MEDA) architecture based digital microfluidics. This is because of the advanced fluidic movement operations incorporated in the MEDA architecture. This paper investigates the testing methodologies for conventional digital microfluidics based biochips and their relevancy to the MEDA architecture based digital microfluidics biochips.