Title:  CMOS Multi-modal Integrated Systems for Future Bioelectronis and Biosensors

Committee:

Dr. Hua Wang, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Muhannad Bakir, ECE

Dr. Omer Inan, ECE

Dr. Arjang Hassibi, InSilixa

Dr. Wilbur Lam, BME

Abstract: Cells are the basic structural biological units of all known living organisms. They are highly sophisticated system with thousands of molecules operating in hundreds of pathways to maintain their proper functions, phenotypes, and physiological behaviors. With this scale of complexity, cells often exhibit multi-physiological properties as their cellular fingerprints from external stimulations. In order to further advance the frontiers in bioscience and biotechnologies such as stem cell manufacturing, synthetic biology, and regenerative medicine, it is required to better comprehend complex cell physiology of living cells. Therefore, a comprehensive set of technologies is needed to harvest quantitative biological data from given cell samples. Such demands have stimulated extensive research on new bioelectronics and biosensors to characterize their functional information of biological or chemical activities through converted electrical signals. As a result, various bioelectronics and biosensors are reported and employed in many in vivo and in vitro applications, such as diagnosis of disease, drug discovery, pharmaceutical screening, healthcare monitoring, and synthetic biology. Since sensing electrodes of the devices physically contact biological/chemical samples and record signals, characterization of electrode-cell/tissue interfaces with high biocompatibility and long-term chemical stability is of paramount importance in numerous biological applications. Furthermore, the devices should achieve high sensitivity/resolution/linearity, large field-of-view (FoV), multi-modal sensing, and real-time monitoring, while maintaining small feature size of devices to use small volume of biological/chemical samples and reduce cost. However, conventional microelectrode arrays (MEAs) on silicon/glass substrate, lab-on-chip devices, and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) single-modal MEAs usually cannot fulfill the requirement, and thus they cannot support highly complex and wide-spectrum physiological relevant responses of the living organisms. My Ph.D research aims to study interfacial electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) of electrodes with different combination of materials/sizes and novel multi-modal sensing/actuation array architectures with CMOS compatible in-house post-processing to address the design challenges of the bioelectronics and biosensors.