CMOS Integrated Lab-on-a-chip System for Personalized DNA Sequencing

Considering the current aging society, the future personalized diagnosis requires portable biomedical devices with miniaturization of bio-instruments. The recent development of lab-on-a-chip (LoC) technology has provided a promising integration platform of CMOS integrated sensor, microfluidic channel, and MEMS. This talk will report the recent progress in CMOS integrated LoC system for personalized DNA sequencing at academia and also industry, including the recent works at NTU CMOS Emerging Technology Group (http://www.ntucmosetgp.net/). Traditional CMOS ion-sensitive-field-effect-transistor (ISFET) has poor pH detection sensitivity as well as faulty pH values. The first selected work (highlighted by IEEE VLSI-SYMP’14 and IEEE TBME’15) is about a dual-mode (chemical + optical) CMOS ISFET sensor, which can improve sequencing accuracy significantly by correlated readout of chemical pH value at location-determined microbead via optical contact imaging. The second selected work (IEEE CICC’15, VLSI-SYMP’16) will further discuss a high-sensitivity sub-threshold readout of pH value by current-to-time-to-voltage conversion (C-TVC), which can reach <1mV or 1pA resolution with fast detection time. By utilizing C-TVC readout scheme, it is possible to identify single nucleotide bases required in the 4th generation DNA sequencing system (Nanopore) with CMOS-compatible solid-state pore (Si3N4/SiO2 membrane).