Online Synthesis for Error Recovery in Digital Microfluidic Biochips with Operation Variability

Microfluidic-based biochips are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers, and are able to integrate on-chip all the necessary functions for biochemical analysis using microfluidics. The digital microfluidic biochips are based on the manipulation of liquids not as a continuous flow, but as discrete droplets.

Researchers have presented approaches for the synthesis of digital microfluidic biochips, which, starting from a biochemical application and a given biochip architecture, determine the allocation, resource binding, scheduling, placement and routing of the operations in the application. The droplet volumes can vary erroneously due to parametric faults, thus impacting negatively the correctness of the application.

Researchers have proposed approaches that synthesize offline predetermined recovery subroutines, which are activated online when errors occur. In this paper, we propose an online synthesis strategy, which determines the appropriate recovery actions at the moment when faults are detected. We have also proposed a biochemical application model which can capture both time-redundant and space-redundant recovery operations.

Experiments performed on three real-life case studies show that, by taking into account the biochip configuration when errors occur, our online synthesis is able to reduce the application times.