Towards Automated Testing of Multiplexers in Fully Programmable Valve Array Biochips

Fully Programmable Valve Array (FPVA) biochips have attracted much attention as a new generation of continuous-flow microfluidic platform for biochemical experiments automation. With the increasing density of microvalves in FPVA biochips, the control system for managing the open/close of these valves has become more and more complex. To improve the scalability of biochips and reduce the number of control pins, a highly efficient control system using multiplexer and boolean logic has been introduced in FPVA biochips. In the manufacturing and using of such systems, however, various faults such as channel blockage, channel leakage, and reliability issues caused by frequent valve switching can occur in the multiplexers. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose the first automated fault test method for the multiplexer of FPVA control systems. The proposed method includes the following key techniques: 1) an automated test pattern generation algorithm based on integer linear programming and 2) an automated fault test strategy based on image recognition technology. Experiment results on multiple benchmarks have shown that the proposed method can generate fewer test patterns, while achiving 100% fault coverage.