Defect tolerance based on graceful degradation and dynamic reconfiguration for digital microfluidics-based biochips

Defect tolerance is an important design consideration for microfluidics-based biochips that are used for safety-critical applications. The authors propose a defect-tolerance methodology based on graceful degradation and dynamic reconfiguration. A tile-based biochip architecture is first introduced, which is scalable for large-scale bioassays. A clustered defect model is used to evaluate the graceful-degradation method for tile-based biochips. The proposed schemes ensure that the bioassays mapped to a droplet-based microfluidic array during design can be executed on a defective biochip through operation rescheduling and/or resource rebinding. Real-life biochemical procedures, namely polymerase chain reaction and multiplexed in vitro diagnostics on human physiological fluids, are used to evaluate the proposed defect-tolerance schemes.