Quasi-static scheduling based error recovery for Digital microfluidic biochips

Abstract

Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) are designed as an alternative to traditional laboratories for bio-chemical synthesis. DMFBs are a class of lab-on-a-chip devices. Error recovery of transient faults which are fluidic-level operations is critical for accuracy sensitive applications like clinical diagnostics and drug discovery. If the errors are not detected and corrected as soon as their occurrence, they propagate till the end of assay and entire assay has to be re-executed for error correction. In this work, we propose a quasi-static scheduling based error recovery (QSSER) for DMFBs. The proposed method can work with both sensor-based and CCD camera-based systems, which are used to detect errors. The proposed QSSER scheduler constitutes offline and online components. Quasi-static scheduling determines offline a set of fault-tolerant schedules for different faults/errors that might occur and decides online which schedule is correct to follow out of offline computed schedules for particular error scenarios. QSSER reduces the online response time and assay completion times while tolerating the maximum transient faults.