Fault Modeling and Fault Simulation in Mixed Micro-Fluidic Microelectronic Systems

Developments in electronic/fluidic microsystems are progressing rapidly. The ultimate goal is to deliver products in the 10,000 fluidic reaction-wells range. Exciting applications include massive parallel DNA analysis and automatic drug synthesis. Until now, only functional testing has been used to guarantee the quality of micro-fluidic systems after manufacturing.In this paper, defect-oriented test approaches developed in analogue fault modeling and simulation have been used to predict for the first time the faulty behavior of micro-electronic fluidic microsystems. The modeling is targeted for use in complex electronic/fluidic microsystems employing commercial microsystem CAD tools. It enables a measure for the quality of these systems based on the performed (functional) tests and can be a guide for future test-stimuli generation and yield prediction.