A Programmable Bio-Chip With Adaptive Pattern-Control Micro-Electrode-Dot-Array

A digital lab-on-CMOS chip is presented for nucleic acid amplification test. This biochip consists of programmable microelectrode dot array and digital timing controller. With novel circuit design in each microelectrode, microfluidic operations with velocity of 0.6mm/s, temperature profile with maximum change rate of 4.5°C/s and location sensing in
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second-level can be achieved. As a result, test samples can be located first, followed by target operations to meet the requirements of specific medical tests with less reagent consumption and test time/cost. Furthermore bio-protocols can be derived to ensure both replicability and reliability in various medical tests. Preliminary results in loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) and PCR thermal cycle tests demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal with less test time of < 40 min and < 1 min respectively, making our proposal very suitable for mobile healthcare applications.