A Charge Sensitive Pre-Amplifier for Smart Point-of-Care Devices Employing Polymer-Based Lab-on-a-Chip

With increasing emphasis on implantable and portable medical devices, low-power, small-chip-area sensor readout systems realized in lab-on-a-chip (LOC) platforms are gaining more and more importance. The main building blocks of the LOC system include a front-end transducer that generates an electrical signal in response to the presence of an analyte of interest, signal processing electronics to process the signal to comply with a specific transmission protocol, and a low-power transmitter, all realized in a single integrated circuit platform. Low power consumption and compactness of the components are essential requirements of the LOC system. This brief presents a novel charge sensitive pre-amplifier developed in a standard 180-nm CMOS process suitable for implementing in an LOC platform. The pre-amplifier converts the charge generated by a pyroelectric transducer into a voltage signal, which provides a measurement of the temperature variation in biological fluids. The proposed design is capable of providing 0.8-mV/pC gain while consuming only 2.1 μW of power. The pre-amplifier composed of integrated components occupies an area of 0.038 mm
²
.