Over the past few years, we have witnessed a significant increase in research on biological systems by engineers for environmental and biomedical diagnostics. Despite efforts to develop chips for biological assay detection, there continues to be a need to improve implementations of micro-scale detection and processing systems for further convenience, scaling and portability. These devices will lead to a significant cost-savings, throughput increases, and enable heretofore infeasible biological assays making “in the field” biological testing a reality. Thus infectious diseases can be detected rapidly and accurately onsite potentially averting the spread of illnesses or tainted foodstuffs. We will present the design and implementation of monolithic and hybrid sensors using integrated circuits, particularly in CMOS.

We will begin by providing the definitions and performance metrics of sensors and a brief overview of various noise processes. Subsequently, we will discuss the advantages and shortcomings of sensors built in silicon-based fabrication processes and examine, in detail, their integrated circuit topologies. Next, we will provide a comprehensive study of the design and analysis of CMOS integrated image sensors, integrated biosensors, and electronic backbone of MEMS hybrid sensors. Topics include: silicon photodetectors; CCD and CMOS sensor architectures and circuits; Affinity-based detection and biochemical transduction; optical, electrochemical, and mechanical transducer design; integrated microarrays, biochips, and sensor SoCs.

Host: Yehia Massoud massoud@rice.edu

Biography of Khaled Salama:
Khaled Salama received his Bachelors degree with honors from the Electronics and Communications Department, Cairo University, Egypt in 1997 and the Masters and PhD degrees from the Electrical Engineering Department, Stanford University, USA in 2000 and 2005 respectively. He joined the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute an Assistant Professor in 2005. He was elected to both IEEE Sensory systems and IEEE BioCircuits technical committees in 2006. His work on low light detection and fully integrated imagers has been funded by DARPA and NIH and was awarded the Stanford-Berkeley Innovators Challenge Award in biological sciences. He coauthored 30 papers and 3 patents in the areas of high dynamic range CMOS image sensors (focal plane arrays), Vision Chips, biosensors, low-power mixed-signal circuits for intelligent sensors and medical instrumentation.