Research database

Swarms of drinkable biosensing devices with dimensions comparable to a blood cell, suitable to be internalized in the human body so that to sense, acquire and transmit outside the body information of clinical interest have been recently envisioned as the new frontier of biomedical electronics. Such microscale biosensors would have ground-breaking applications, among the others, in cancer tracking, diagnosis and cure of brain disorders, non-invasive, real-time monitoring of metabolites, biomarkers, drugs and pathogens, as required to identify the source and to track the evolution of diseases, to enhance the effectiveness of therapies and to significantly improve the quality of life of patients. Turning this vision into reality demands tens-of-micrometers-scale, sub-microwatt power, remotely powered and controlled biosensing chips that are well beyond the state of the art of wearable and implantable devices, and whose design and fabrication raise unique multidisciplinary challenges. In the MicroBioNIC project we are going to tackle and overcome the IC design challenges of microscale biosensing by new, ground-breaking concepts in sensor acquisition and in wireless power and data transfer, which we are going to develop and demonstrate on silicon, as needed to meet the requirements of a microscale biosensing platform integrated on chip