A digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) is an attractive platform for immunoassays, point-of-care clinical diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and other laboratory procedures in biochemistry. A recent generation of biochips uses a micro-electrode-dot-array (MEDA) architecture, which provides fine-grained controllability of droplets and seamlessly integrates microelectronics and microfluidics using CMOS technology. In order to ensure robust fluidic operations and high confidence in the outcome of biochemical experiments, chip testing, fault diagnosis, and fault recovery are critical for MEDA biochips. In this article, we present an effective fault-recovery solution based on the homogeneous structure of MEDA. Since the microelectrode cells (MCs) in an MEDA biochip are identical, we add multiplexers for reconfigurability, whereby an MC with faulty components can use the hardware resources in a neighboring MC. In addition, we use the IEEE 1687 (also known as IJTAG) network to reduce the number of control signals needed for the multiplexers, and to provide flexible subscan chain access for the fault-recovery control flow. A comprehensive set of simulation results demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed fault-recovery solution for MEDA biochips.

中文翻译：

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MEDA 生物芯片的基于 IJTAG 的故障恢复和稳健的微电极单元设计

数字微流控生物芯片 (DMFB) 是免疫分析、床旁临床诊断、DNA 测序和其他生物化学实验室程序的有吸引力的平台。最新一代生物芯片使用微电极点阵列 (MEDA) 架构，可提供液滴的细粒度可控性，并使用 CMOS 技术无缝集成微电子和微流体。为了确保稳健的流体操作和对生化实验结果的高度信任，芯片测试、故障诊断和故障恢复对于 MEDA 生物芯片至关重要。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于 MEDA 同构结构的有效故障恢复解决方案。由于 MEDA 生物芯片中的微电极细胞 (MC) 是相同的，因此我们添加了多路复用器以实现可重构性，从而具有故障组件的 MC 可以使用相邻 MC 中的硬件资源。此外，我们使用 IEEE 1687（也称为 IJTAG）网络来减少多路复用器所需的控制信号数量，并为故障恢复控制流提供灵活的子扫描链访问。一组全面的模拟结果证明了所提出的 MEDA 生物芯片故障恢复解决方案的有效性。