CMOS Capacitive Dry DNA Storage Monitoring: Design, Implementation and Experimental Results

This paper presents the design, and implementation of a new CMOS capacitive sensor and proposes the applicability of the sensor in monitoring the dried DNA mass for the emerging DNA memory technologies. The concept of DNA-based data storage has shown to be a promising solution with an ultra-high data density storage capability of gigabytes per nanogram mass of DNA. There are several drawbacks in achieving a ubiquitous technology and existing research has mostly addressed the translation of digital data to synthesized nucleotides, the physical storage of DNA, and reading out the data via sequencing, as well as computational processes. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of monitoring the physical storage of dried DNA material by developing a CMOS capacitive sensor that detects the dried DNA mass and inherits the highly integrable nature of CMOS chips with other parts to develop a DNA storage system. The successful detection of down to 45 ng
$/ \boldsymbol {\mu }\text{L}$
mass of dried DNA has been successfully shown with the experimental results that consist of five runs for five different concentrations. Based on the results, the detection range of sub-pico Mol has been achieved which is compatible with the concentrations of DNA used in DNA memory technologies.