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Testing and Diagnosis of Realistic Defects in Digital Microfluidic Biochips

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Abstract

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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intel Corporation, Folsom, CA, USA

    Fei Su

  2. St John’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    William Hwang

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, 28223, USA

    Arindam Mukherjee

  4. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Krishnendu Chakrabarty

Authors
  1. Fei Su
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  2. William Hwang
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  3. Arindam Mukherjee
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  4. Krishnendu Chakrabarty
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Krishnendu Chakrabarty.

Additional information

Editor: M. Tehranipoor

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-0312352 and CCF-0541055. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Proc. IEEE International Test Conference, pp. 487–496, 2005.

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Su, F., Hwang, W., Mukherjee, A. et al. Testing and Diagnosis of Realistic Defects in Digital Microfluidic Biochips. J Electron Test 23, 219–233 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-006-0554-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-006-0554-8

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