Towards fault-tolerant digital microfluidic lab-on-chip: Defects, fault modeling, testing, and reconfiguration

Dependability is an important attribute for microfluidic lab-on-chip devices that are being developed for safety-critical applications such as point-of-care health assessment, air-quality monitoring, and food-safety testing. Therefore, these devices must be adequately tested after manufacture and during bioassay operations. This paper presents a survey of early work on fault tolerance in digital microfluidic lab-on-chip systems. Defects are related to logical fault models that can be viewed not only in terms of traditional shorts and opens, but which also target biochip functionality. Based on these fault models, test techniques for lab-on-chip devices and digital microfluidic modules are presented.