Environment for Modeling and Simulation of Biosystems, Biosensors, and Lab-on-Chips

The design of biosystems, biosensors, and lab-on-chips is an important field of investigation since the beginning of this century. The miniaturization and the integration constraints make the design of such systems challenging, and it is no longer possible to uncouple biology (or biochemistry) from the rest of the system. The interest of extending microelectronics computer-aided design tools to multidomain systems has already been demonstrated for two decades. Today, it becomes necessary to include biology among these domains. To enable such an evolution, we demonstrate an analogy between the behavior of biochemical systems and electrical circuits. This analogy is exploited to develop a tool for the description and the simulation of biological systems with SPICE. In addition, another analogy is drawn between molecular diffusion and heat diffusion. We also rely on it to develop an innovative framework for the simulation with SPICE of reaction-diffusion problems. The interest of such an approach is illustrated in the design of a penicillin sensor. A complete model of the system, which integrates biochemistry, electrochemistry, and electronics, is obtained. This model is then simulated for a first dimensioning of the sensor.