Tutorials

CMOS Sensor Arrays for Highly Parallel Bio Molecule Detection: From Detection Principles to Circuit and System Design

Roland Thewes, TU Berlin, Germany

Date: 3rd November 2010, 09:30-11:00

CMOS-based arrays used for bio molecule detection in a highly parallel manner have attracted much attention during recent years as they promise to provide advantages compared to state-of-the-art commercially available tools using optical principles. Today, various CMOS-based approaches have been published and their feasibility has been demonstrated. Successful development of such platforms requires to match and to understand the interdependencies of sensor principle, manufacturing processes, material sciences, CMOS extension, sensor interface circuitry, assembly techniques, fluidics, … . The objective of this tutorial is to provide an in-depth overview from an engineer’s point concerning the different areas mentioned above. Thus, some basics concerning biology and biological processes as well as related applications are briefly reviewed in order to proceed with a consideration of the entire operation flow of such platforms on that basis. A number of different transducer techniques are discussed which are used to transfer the information from the biological into the electronic domain. Extended CMOS processing requirements are considered as well. Emphasis is put on the question to derive electrical specifications and related circuit requirements from the different readout principles discussed. Circuit design principles and related circuitry on transistor and on block level published in the literature are highlighted in order to merge practical design aspects with the beforehand made specifications. Last not least, system and assembly aspects are briefly discussed as well.

Short Biography: Roland Thewes received the Dipl.-Ing. degree and the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany, in 1990 and 1995, respectively. In 1994, he joined the Research Laboratories of Siemens AG, where he was active in the design of non-volatile memories and in the field of reliability and yield of analog CMOS circuits. From 1997-1999, he managed projects in the fields of design for manufacturability, reliability, analog device performance, and analog CMOS circuit design. From 2000-2005, he was responsible for the Lab on Mixed-Signal Circuits of Corporate Research of Infineon Technologies focusing on CMOS-based bio-sensors, low voltage analog CMOS circuit design, and device-circuit interaction. From 2006 until March 2009, he was heading a department focusing on Advanced DRAM Core Circuitry in the Product Development Division of Qimonda. Moreover, since 2005 he also has been serving as a consultant of the Max-Planck Society in the area of CMOS-based neural interfacing. Since April 2009, he is a full professor at TU Berlin focusing on electronic sensors and actuators for bio-sensing and neural interfacing purposes. He has authored or co-authored more than 120 technical publications including book chapters, tutorials, invited papers, etc., and authored or co-authored a similar number of granted patents and patent applications. He is a member of the Technical Program Committees of ISSCC and ESSCIRC, and of the Joint Steering Committee of ESSDERC/ESSCIRC. In the past he also served as a member of the Executive Committee of IEDM, and as a member of the Technical Program Committees of IEDM, IRPS, ESSDERC, and ESREF. He is a recipient of the German President’s Future Award (2004), the ISSCC 2002 Jack Raper Award (2003), and recipient or co-recipient of 6 further paper and conference awards. Dr. Thewes is a Senior Member and Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE.

Prosthetics and rehabilitation devices: hybrid biosystems that are getting smarter

James Abbas, Arizona State University, USA

Date: 3rd November 2010, 11:30-13:00

Across our society, the boundaries between technology and the human are becoming increasingly blurred, but people with disabilities are at the forefront of taking smart hybrid biosystems into daily use. External devices respond to touch, sound, bioelectrical potentials or movement to restore neuromotor function and provide independence. Implanted electronics activate neural circuits to restore sensation or re-establish brain activity patterns after trauma or the onset of neurodegenerative disease. This tutorial will review the hybrid systems that are already in daily use and then present on-going research directed at earning the ‘smart’ label for the next generation of hybrid biosystems for prosthetics and rehabilitation.

Short Biography: James J. Abbas, PhD is co-director of the Center for Adaptive Neural Systems (http://ans.asu.edu/) at Arizona State University, and is a Biomedical Engineering faculty member in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering. He is also a member of the graduate faculties of Mechanical Engineering and of Neuroscience. Professor Abbas received his B.S. in bioelectrical engineering from Brown University in Providence, RI, USA and his M.S. and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, USA. He is currently on the Editorial Board of Frontiers in Neuroengineering and the Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation and has served as an officer of the International Functional Electrical Stimulation Society. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Recreational Technologies of the US National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research and on research review boards for the US National Institutes of Health. Dr. Abbas is co-Founder and Vice-President of customKYnetics, Inc., which develops products for neurorehabilitation. His research interests are in applying neural engineering techniques in the area of medical rehabilitation. Current projects include the development and assessment of systems that use electrical stimulation for therapy after spinal cord injury, systems to improve neuromotor control in children with cerebral Palsy, systems to restore sensory capabilities to amputees, and techniques to improve sensorimotor function in people with Parkinson’s Disease. These projects utilize extensive clinical and industrial partnerships.

Design of CMOS Circuits for Energy Scavenging and Self-powered Sensor Systems

Shantanu Chakrabartty, Michigan State University, USA

Date: 3rd November 2010, 14:30-15:45

Energy scavenging and self-powering has emerged as a multi-disciplinary area of research for miniaturized, long-term and autonomous monitoring applications where the use of batteries is considered to be impractical. An example which is relevant to biomedical engineering is to be able to harvest energy from body movements, vibrations or temperature gradients to power implanted or wearable sensors. The first part of this tutorial will cover some of the fundamentals of energy scavenging which will borrow concepts from different engineering disciplines. The objective will be to illustrate some of the challenges and constraints imposed by different harvesting modes on energy storage and electronics. Following the introductory material, examples of CMOS circuits used in energy scavenging will be presented and their performance limitations will be discussed. The second part of the tutorial will discuss a specific case study of a hybrid energy harvesting integrated circuit which the presenter has been successfully used for structural health monitoring applications. This case study will illustrate how ultra-low power analog signal processing circuits when used in conjunction with conventional energy harvesting circuits could stretch the limits of energy-efficiency in an application specific self-powered battery-less sensor.

Short Biography: Shantanu Chakrabartty received his B.Tech degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1996, M.S and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD in 2002 and 2005 respectively. He is currently an associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University. From 1996-1999 he was with Qualcomm Incorporated, San Diego and during 2002 he was a visiting researcher at The University of Tokyo. His current research interests include energy harvesting sensors and integrated circuits, hybrid circuits and systems and ultra-low power analog signal processing ncircuits. Dr. Chakrabartty was a Catalyst foundation fellow from 1999-2004 and is a recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER award. He has published more than 80 refereed articles and he also serves on several technical committees of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He is also currently serving as the associate editor for Advances in Artificial Neural Systems journal and a review editor for Frontiers of Neuromorphic Engineering journal.

FPAA devices for Biological Modeling, Computing, and Interfacing Applications

Paul Hasler, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Arindam Basu, NTU, Singapore

Date: 3rd November 2010, 16:00-17:15

Interest in FPAA devices continues to increase for a wide range of applications, including biological applications, where some have been presented at previous and current BioCAS conferences. Large Scale Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAA) enable analog circuit and signal processing techniques in a similar reconfigurable framework that we use FPGAs and other digital processors. To further facilitate the use of this technology, the organizers of this tutorial provide a combined tutorial lecture and hands-on workshop to educate the use of these devices as well as show the potential of these devices. We will start the workshop with an overview of configurable analog IC techniques and the high level circuit techniques and tradeoffs. We will then proceed to enable participants to walk through basic circuit concepts implemented on the FPAA device. We will utilize FPAA devices and test board infrastruture developed at Georgia Tech. We will finish the session discussing how to use these devices for Bio applications; we will slant the discussions (and potential demonstrations) based on audience interest.

Paul Hasler is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Hasler received his M.S. and B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University in 1991, and received his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in Computation and Neural Systems in 1997. His current research interests include low power electronics, mixed-signal system ICs, floating-gate MOS transistors, adaptive information processing systems,”smart” interfaces for sensors, cooperative analog-digital signal processing (CADSP), device physics related to submicron devices or floating-gate devices, and analog VLSI models of on-chip learning and sensory processing in neurobiology. Dr. Hasler received the NSF CAREER Award in 2001, and the ONR Young Investigator Award (YIP) award in 2002. Dr. Hasler received the Paul Raphorst Best Paper Award, IEEE Electron Devices Society, 1997; a Best Paper Award at SCI 2001; Best Sensor Track Paper, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, 2005; Best Student Paper Award, IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) 2006; and Best Student Paper Award, IEEE Ultrasound Symposium, 2006, and Best Demonstration Track Paper, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, 2010. Dr. Hasler is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Arindam Basu received the B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology,Kharagpur in 2005, the M.S. degree in Mathematics and PhD. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Dr. Basu received the Prime Minister of India Gold Medal in 2005 from I.I.T Kharagpur (awarded to the top student). In the summer of 2008, he worked at Texas Instruments, Dallas and developed automatic tuning strategies for LNAs designed in 45nm and 65nm. He joined Nanyang Technological University as an Assistant professor in June 2010.

Dr. Basu received the best student paper award at Ultrasonics symposium, 2006, best live demonstration at ISCAS 2010 and a finalist position in the best student paper contest at ISCAS 2008. He has 30 publications and 2 U.S. patents pending. His research interests include bio-inspired neuromorphic circuits, non-linear dynamics in neural systems, low power analog IC design and programmable circuits and devices.

Hybrid Microsystems: Engineering at the interfaces between silicon and living systems
Andreas Andreou, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Date: 3rd November 2010, 17:30-18:45

Biological systems are networks of structures at different physical scale hierarchies that operate at performance levels set by fundamental physical limits, under severe constraints of size, weight and energy resources. They are indeed, engineering marvels of heterogeneous integration and structural complexity. In this tutorial we will discuss microsystems engineering at the interfaces between synthetic (silicon) and living systems. At the organism level we will discuss systems for neural prostheses and rehabilitation. At the cellular level we will discuss devices in different energy domains, at a hierarchy of size scales, from nano to micro and macro that are necessary to obtain essential functionality at the system level. I will give examples of microsystems for biosensing, advanced imaging, chip scale array interferometry and manipulation of magnetic nano particles and nanorods. A unique aspect of system integration for these systems is necessity for functionality in three dimensions. 3D CMOS technology offers possibility for truly complex and integrated structures. Looking ahead at the challenges that we face as we seek to synthesize such heterogeneous microsystems, living and non-living, Nature is a good place to draw inspiration!

Short Biography: Andreas G. Andreou received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1986 from Johns Hopkins University. Between 1986 and 1989 he held post-doctoral fellow and associate research scientist positions in the Electrical and Computer engineering department while also a member of the professional staff at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Andreou became an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer engineering in 1989, associate professor in 1993 and professor in 1996. He is also a professor of Computer Science and of the Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute and director of the Institute's Fabrication and Lithography Facility in Clark Hall. He is the co-founder of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing. Between 2001 and 2003 he was the founding director of the ABET accredited undergraduate Computer Engineering program. In 1996 and 1997 he was a visiting professor of the computation and neural systems program at the California Institute of Technology. In 1989 and 1991 he was awarded the R.W. Hart Prize for his work on mixed analog/digital integrated circuits for space applications. He is the recipient of the 1995 and 1997 Myril B. Reed Best Paper Award and the 2000 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, Darlington Best Paper Award. During the summer of 2001 he was a visiting professor in the department of systems engineering and machine intelligence at Tohoku University. In 2006, Prof. Andreou was elected as an IEEE Fellow and a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE EDS society. Andreou's research interests include sensors, micropower electronics, heterogeneous microsystems, and information processing in biological systems. He is a co-editor of the IEEE Press book: Low-Voltage/Low-Power Integrated Circuits and Systems, 1998 (translated in Japanese) and the Kluwer Academic Publishers book: Adaptive Resonance Theory Microchips, 1998. He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems.