A Low-Power CMOS Microfluidic Pump Based on Travelling-Wave Electroosmosis for Diluted Serum Pumping

Abstract

Microfluidic pump is an essential component in lab-on-chip applications. It is of importance to develop an active microfluidic pump with low-power and low-cost characteristics for portable and miniaturized diagnostic systems. Taking advantages of CMOS technologies, in this work, we report a low-power microfluidic pump based on travelling-wave electroosmosis (TWEO). Utilizing an integrated driving circuit, this monolithic CMOS microfluidic pump can be operated at 1.5 V driving voltage with a power consumption of 1.74 mW. The integrated driving circuit consist of a resistor-capacitor (RC) oscillator, a 90-degrees phase-shift square wave generator, and buffer amplifiers. Moreover, capabilities of the developed CMOS TWEO pump to drive diluted human serum are characterized. The flow rate of diluted human serum with dilution ratio of 1:1000 can achieve 51 μm/s. This is the first time demonstrating an in-situ CMOS-based microfluidic pump to drive the clinical diluted serum sample. As a consequence, this work demonstrates an essential component of CMOS biotechnologies for potential applications of portable in vitro diagnosis (IVD) systems.

A Hybrid Microfluidic Electronic Sensing Platform for Life Science Applications

“…Sensor-integrated microfluidic devices were reported for applications such as DNA hybridization [ 28 , 29 ], polymerase chain reaction (PCR) on-chip [ 30 , 31 ], virus detection [ 32 , 33 ], cancer detection [ 34 , 35 ], circulating tumor cells (CTC) analysis [ 36 , 37 ], exosomes analysis [ 38 , 39 ], nucleic acids analysis [ 40 , 41 ], liquid biopsy-based assays for cancer detection [ 42 ]. CMOS-based sensors integration with microfluidic is put forward for cell analysis [ 43 , 44 ], chemical sensing [ 45 ], optical biosensing [ 46 ], ultraprecise micro pumping [ 47 ], 2D nanomaterial detection [ 48 ], optofluidics biomedical devices [ 49 ]. For CMOS sensors integration with microfluidic, the direct-write microfluidic fabrication process (DWFP) was introduced as a comparatively new rapid technique for creating microfluidics atop an electronic chip [ 50 ].…”

A practical microfluidic pump enabled by acoustofluidics and 3D printing

“…Due to this pliability and control, this group of microfluidic systems is generally referred as active pumps (Au et al 2011 ; Huang et al 2014 ). A commonly used mechanism within this group is manipulating fluids by externally applied electric fields also known as electrokinetics (Studer et al 2002 ; Li et al 2019 ; Yen et al 2019 ). Some of the important subcategories of electrokinetic effects are dielectrophoresis, electroosmosis, induced charge electroosmosis, and electrophoresis (Hossan et al 2018 ).…”

Integrated Magnetohydrodynamic Pump with Magnetic Composite Substrate and Laser-Induced Graphene Electrodes

“…In [ 4 ], a passive ionogel pump was used to control fluid flow in a micropaper analytic device for low-cost analytical applications. A traveling wave electroosmotic pump implemented using CMOS technology is presented in [ 5 ], which is capable of pumping diluted human serum for in vitro diagnostic systems.…”