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Test Planning in Digital Microfluidic Biochips Using Efficient Eulerization Techniques

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Abstract

Digital microfluidic technology is now being extensively used for implementing a lab-on-a-chip. Microfluidic biochips are often used for safety-critical applications, clinical diagnosis, and for genome analysis. Thus, devising effective and faster testing methodologies to warrant correct operations of these devices after manufacture and during bioassay operations, is very much needed. In this paper, we propose an Euler tour based technique to obtain the route plan of a test droplet for the purpose of structural testing of biochips. The method is applicable to various digital microfluidic biochip architectures, e.g., fully reconfigurable arrays, application specific biochips, pin-constrained irregular geometry biochips, and to defect-tolerant biochips. We show that in general, the optimal Eulerization and subsequent determination of an Euler tour in the graph model of a biochip can be abstracted in terms of the classical Chinese postman problem. The Euler tour can be identified by running the classical Hierholzer’s algorithm, which relies on a simple cycle decomposition and splicing method. This improved Eulerization technique leads to an efficient test plan for the chip. This can also be used in phase-based test planning that yields savings in testing time. The method provides a unified approach towards structural testing and can be easily adopted to design a droplet routing procedure for functional testing of digital microfluidic biochips.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India

    Debasis Mitra

  2. Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur, India

    Sarmishtha Ghoshal

  3. Department of Information Technology, Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur, India

    Hafizur Rahaman

  4. Department of Electrical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Krishnendu Chakrabarty

  5. Advanced Computing and Microelectronics Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India

    Bhargab B. Bhattacharya

Authors
  1. Debasis Mitra
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  2. Sarmishtha Ghoshal
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  3. Hafizur Rahaman
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  4. Krishnendu Chakrabarty
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  5. Bhargab B. Bhattacharya
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Correspondence to Debasis Mitra.

Additional information

Responsible Editor: B.C. Kim

Earlier versions of this paper have appeared, in part, in the proceedings of the Asian Test Symposium (ATS), 2008 and 2010 [16, 17]. The work of S. Ghoshal was supported by a grant from the Dept. of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India. The work of K. Chakrabarty was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation under grant no. CCF-0914895.

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Mitra, D., Ghoshal, S., Rahaman, H. et al. Test Planning in Digital Microfluidic Biochips Using Efficient Eulerization Techniques. J Electron Test 27, 657–671 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-011-5239-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-011-5239-2

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