Fault Recovery in Micro-Electrode-Dot-Array Digital Microfluidic Biochips Using an IJTAG NetworkBehaviors

摘要

A digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) is an attractive platform for immunoassays, point-of-care clinical diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and other laboratory procedures in biochemistry. A recent generation of biochips uses a micro-electrode-dot-array (MEDA) architecture, which provides fine-grained controllability of droplets and seamlessly integrates microelectronics and microfluidics using CMOS technology. In order to ensure robust fluidic operations and high confidence in the outcome of biochemical experiments, chip testing, fault diagnosis and fault recovery are critical for MEDA biochips. In this paper, we present an effective fault- recovery solution based on the homogeneous structure of MEDA. Since the microelectrode cell (MCs) in a MEDA biochip are identical, we add multiplexers for reconfigurability, whereby an MC with faulty components can use the hardware resources in a neighboring MC. In addition, we use the IEEE 1687 (a.k.a. IJTAG) network to reduce the number of control signals need for the multiplexers, and to provide flexible sub-scan chain access for the fault-recovery control flow. A comprehensive set of simulation results demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed fault-recovery solution for MEDA biochips.