Reliability-Oriented IEEE Std. 1687 Network Design and Block-Aware High-Level Synthesis for MEDA Biochips *

A digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) enables miniaturization of immunoassays, point-of-care clinical diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and other laboratory procedures in biochemistry. A recent generation of biochips uses a microelectrode-dot-array (MEDA) architecture, which provides fine-grained control of droplets and seamlessly integrates microelectronics and microfluidics using CMOS technology. To ensure that bioassays are carried out on MEDA biochips efficiently, high-level synthesis algorithms have recently been proposed. However, as in the case of conventional DMFBs, microelectrodes are likely to fail when they are heavily utilized, and previous methods fail to consider reliability issues. In this paper, we present the design of an IEEE Std. 1687 (IJTAG) network and a block-aware high-level synthesis method that can effectively alleviate reliability problems in MEDA biochips. A comprehensive set of simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.