An Efficient Multiple Fault Detection Technique in Digital Microfluidic Biochips

ABSTRACT

The involvement of Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) in the field of disease detection, automated drug discovery, on-chip DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) analysis has become well-accepted during last decades. Though trustworthiness of Digital Microfluidic Biochip system plays a vital role in point-of-care diagnosis, defective electrodes are the main reasons for various misleading assay performances. It also affects overall assay completion time; even it leads to discard a chip in the worst scenario. Hence, fault detection is a crucial need. In this paper, an efficient fault detection mechanism is formulated to identify multiple numbers of defective/faulty electrodes on an m × n biochip array, where m and n can be of any positive number. Test droplets are strategically routed throughout an arbitrary sized electrode array and capacitive sensing circuit is deployed to take decision about existence of faults. The basic idea of the proposed technique is to identify actual positions of faulty electrodes through boundary test, row test, and diagonal test. In some complicated cases, instead of finding exact faulty location(s), through an extended testing our proposed technique identifies faulty zone(s) (it is a bounded region where one or more defective electrodes reside) to ensure safe assay performance on a chip. A detailed study evaluates the proposed approach considering different faulty environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Biochip
• DMFB
• Droplet
• Fault detection
• Fluidic constraints
• LOC

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sagarika Chowdhury

Sagarika Chowdhury received the BTech degree from Narula Institute of Technology under West Bengal University of Technology, Kolkata, India and MTech degree from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India in 2005 and 2009, respectively. For the last 13 years, she is working as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Narula Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India. She is also pursuing research activities at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Calcutta. Ms Chowdhury’s current research interests include DMFB, VLSI design, scheduling algorithms, etc. She has published several international technical research articles.

Piyali Datta

Piyali Datta received the BSc, BTech, and MTech degrees in 2010, 2013, and 2015, respectively, from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India. Presently, she is working as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India, while also pursuing her PhD degree at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Calcutta. Ms Datta’s current research interests include microfluidics, computational geometry, VLSI design, scheduling algorithms, etc. Ms Datta has published more than 30 technical research articles. E-mail: [email protected]

Rajat Kumar Pal

Rajat Kumar Pal received the BE degree in electrical engineering from the Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur, under the University of Calcutta, India, and the MTech degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Calcutta, India in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He received the PhD degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India in 1996. Presently, he is working as a professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Calcutta, India. He holds several international patents and his research interests include VLSI design, graph theory, design and analysis of algorithms, logic synthesis, computational geometry, etc. Dr Pal has published more than 200 technical research articles, and authored and co-authored several books. E-mail: [email protected]

Goutam Saha

Goutam Saha received the BE degree in electrical engineering and the ME degree in electronics and telecommunication engineering from the Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur, under the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India in 1984 and 1989, respectively. He received the PhD degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India in 1999. He also has post-doctoral research experience at the IIT, Kharagpur, India and the Ben Gurion University, Israel. Presently, he is working as a professor at the Department of Information Technology, North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, India. Dr Saha’s current research interests include computational biology, bioinformatics, nanotechnology, etc. Dr Saha has published more than 40 technical research articles. E-mail: [email protected]