FTCD: Fault-Tolerant Co-Design of Flow and Control Layers for Fully Programmable Valve Array Biochips

Abstract

As a new generation of flow-based microfluidics, fully programmable valve array (FPVA) biochips have gained widespread adoption as a biochemical experimental platform, thanks to their enhanced programmability and flexibility. Environmental and human factors, however, often introduce physical faults during the manufacturing process, such as channel blockage and leakage, which, undoubtedly, can affect the results of bioassays and even cause execution failure. In this article, we focus on the fault-tolerant co-design of flow and control layers in FPVA biochips for the first time. For the flow layer, three dynamic fault-tolerant techniques, i.e., a cell function conversion method, a bidirectional redundancy scheme, and a fault mapping method, are presented and integrated into the device placement and flow routing stages. As a consequence, we further realize an efficient and effective fault-tolerance-oriented physical design method, thus ensuring the robustness of chip architecture and correctness of assay outcomes. For the control layer, we design another three fault-tolerant techniques, including a series duplication scheme of leakage valves, allocation and merging rules of backup valves, and a logic conflict-aware adjustment strategy of redundant architecture. Based on these techniques, we construct a fault-tolerant control system to realize dynamic recovery of control signals. Experimental results on multiple test cases demonstrate that the proposed method can produce optimized fault-tolerant FPVA architectures with low-fabrication cost, high-execution efficiency, and high-fault-tolerance success rate.