Microfluidics-based biochips consist of microfluidic arrays on rigid substrates through which, movement of fluids is tightly controlled to facilitate biological reactions. Biochips are soon expected to revolutionize biosensing, clinical diagnostics, and drug discovery. Critical to the deployment of biochips in such diverse areas is the dependability of these systems. Thus, robust testing techniques are required to ensure an adequate level of system dependability. Due to the underlying mixed technology and energy domains, such biochips exhibit unique failure mechanisms and defects. In this article we present a highly effective fault diagnosis strategy that uses a single source and sink to detect and locate multiple faults in a microfluidic array, without flooding the array, a problem that has hampered realistic implementations of all existing strategies. The strategy renders itself well for a built-in self-test that could drastically reduce the operating cost of microfluidic biochips. It can be used during both the manufacturing phase of the biochip, as well as field operation. Furthermore, the algorithm can pinpoint the actual fault, as opposed to merely the faulty regions that are typically identified by strategies proposed in the literature. Also, analytical results suggest that it is an effective strategy that can be used to design highly dependable biochip systems.

With the miniaturized biochips finding applications in safety-critical applications dependability of these chips has become an important issue since the consequences of a malfunction of such as chip could be catastrophic. Thus, these chips have to be tested both after the manufacture as well as during field operations. In this paper we propose an integrated testing and diagnosis strategy for the digital microfluidic biochips that can locate single as well as a certain class of multiple defects. This can be used to increase chip yield and dependability of the biochips in the field operation.

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