Pin-count-aware online testing of digital microfluidic biochips

On-line testing offers a promising method for detecting defects, fluidic abnormalities, and bioassay malfunctions in microfluidic biochips. To reduce product cost for disposable biochips, testing steps and functional fluidic operations must be implemented on pin-constrained designs. However, previous testing methods for pin-constrained designs do not optimize test schedules to reduce the number of control pins and test/assay completion time. We propose a pin-count-aware online testing method for pin-constrained designs to support the execution of both fault testing and the target bioassay protocol. The proposed method interleaves fault testing with the target bioassay protocol for online testing. It is aimed at significantly reducing the completion time for testing and for the bioassay, while keeping the number of control pins small. Two practical applications, namely a multiplexed bioassay and an interpolation-based mixing protocol, are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.