Silicon-based Integrated Microarray Biochips for Biosensing and Biodetection Applications

Abstract

The silicon-based integrated microarray biochip (IMB) is an inter-disciplinary research direction of microelectronics and biological science. It has caught the attention of both industry and academia, in applications such as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and immunological detection, medical inspection and point-of-care (PoC) diagnosis, as well as food safety and environmental surveillance. Future biodetection strategies demand biochips with high sensitivity, miniaturization, integration, parallel, multi-target and even intelligence capabilities. In this chapter, a comprehensive investigation of current research on state-of-the-art siliconbased integrated microarray biochips is presented. These include the electrochemical biochip, magnetic tunnelling junction (MTJ) based biochip, giant magnetoresistance (GMR) biochip and integrated oscillator-based biochip. The principles, methodologies and challenges of the aforementioned biochips will also be discussed and compared from all aspects, e.g., sensitivity, fabrication complexity and cost, compatibility with silicon-based complementary metal-oxidesemiconductor (CMOS) technology, multi-target detection capabilities, signal processing and system integrations, etc. In this way, we discuss future siliconbased fully integrated biochips, which could be used for portable medical detection and low cost PoC diagnosis applications.

Design trade-off between spatial resolution and power consumption in CMOS biosensor circuit based on millimeter-wave LC oscillator array

“…The spatial resolution of the sensor is very closely related to the size of each sensing element. However, in the biosensor proposed in previous research, because the on-chip LC oscillator is implemented as the sensing front end, 25,26) the imaging resolution of the sensor is determined by the size of the onchip inductor.…”