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CMOS CAPACITIVE BIOINTERFACES FOR LAB-ON-CHIP APPLICATIONS
8.1 INTRODUCTION
Laboratory-on-chip (LoC) is a multidisciplinary approach used for the miniaturization, integration, and automation of biological assays [1, 2]. Biology and chemistry are experimental sciences that continue to evolve and develop new protocols. Each protocol contains step-by-step laboratory instructions, lists of necessary equipment, and required biological and/or chemical supplies [3]. A biological laboratory contains various pieces of equipment used for performing different types of biological protocols. The engineering aspect of LoC design aims to embed all these components into a single chip for specific applications. Several clear advantages of this technology over conventional approaches, including portability, full automation, ease of operation, low sample consumption, and fast assays time, make LoCs suitable for highly throughput screening, early detection of disease, point-of-care testing, and environmental assessment [4, 5].
Standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) technology, by offering a distinct cost, integrated circuits (ICs), and embedded sensors and/or actuators, as such, is a good fit for implementation of some of the essential functions of LoCs [6, 7]. Indeed, microelectronic CMOS technology allows one to fabricate an active substrate with different types of sensing or actuating sites that can be addressed in a random access mode by means of decoders. ...
