Pebble Traversal-Based Fault Detection and Advanced Reconfiguration Technique for Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) are rapidly replacing conventional biomedical analyzers by incorporating diverse bioassay operations with better throughput and precision at a negligible cost. In the last decade, these microfluidic devices have been well anticipated in miscellaneous healthcare applications such as DNA sequencing, drug discovery, drug screening, clinical diagnosis, etc., and other safety-critical fields like air quality monitoring, food safety testing, etc. In view of the application areas, these devices must incorporate the attributes like reliability, accuracy, and robustness. The correctness of a microfluidic device must be ensured through a superior testing technique before it is accepted for use in various applications. In this paper, an optimized fault modelling strategy to detect multiple faults in a digital microfluidic biochip has been introduced by embedding clockwise and anticlockwise movements of droplets using Pebble Traversal (based on Pebble Motion of Graph Theory). The suggested method also calculates traversal time for a fault-free biochip. In addition, this work presents an Advanced Module Sequence Graph-based reconfiguration technique to reinstate the microfluidic device for regular bioassays.