An efficient novel single fault and its location detection technique using multiple droplets in a Digital Microfluidic Biochip

Abstract

Microfluidic biochip has facilitated a revolutionary improvement in biomedical operation or safety critical application like clinical diagnosis, parallel DNA sequencing, toxicity monitoring, immunoassay, air or water quality monitoring, food safety testing etc. But it has faced a major setback from malfunction in fluidic operation due to the defect in the electrodes. In this paper, we are proposing a novel and efficient technique for detecting a single fault and identifying the fault location within the biochip. Along with that it can also calculate the traversal time if the biochip is fault free. The traversal of the microarray is carried out by scanning the intermediate cells and the edges by special types of movement pattern RDRD (Right-Down-Right-Down) and DRDR (Down-Right-Down-Right) for left and right diagonal electrode traversal respectively and the boundary cells and edges are traversed in clockwise direction by moving the test droplets. If a fault is detected then the proposed technique also locates it by backtracking the droplet. The simulated result suggests that the proposed technique is efficient and represents significant improvement in fault detection and calculating traversal time of a fault free biochip over existing methods.