R&D: CMOS Capacitive DNA Nano-Mass Measurement for DNA Storage Application

IEEE Xplore has published, in 2021 IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE) proceedings, an article written by Hamed Osouli Tabrizi, Saghi Forouhi, Biologically Inspired Sensors and Actuators (BioSA) Lab, Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, Toronto, Canada, Morteza Ghafar-Zadeh, Sebastian Magierowski, The Electronic Machine Intelligence (EMIL) Lab, Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, Toronto, Canada, and Ebrahim Ghafar-Zadeh, Biologically Inspired Sensors and Actuators (BioSA) Lab, Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, Toronto, Canada.

Abstract: “In this paper, we present, for the first time, the advantage of CMOS capacitive sensor for the assessment of dried DNA from an aqueous sample for DNA storage applications. The proposed capacitive sensor consists of a differential capacitance to current converter block based on a core-CBCM circuit, a 300 MHz current controlled oscillator and a 12-bit counter that creates the digital output of the chip. The chip has been fabricated using AMS 0.35µm technology. We demonstrate the functionality and applicability of the proposed sensor for dried DNA nano-mass measurement using single-strand DNA samples. The sensor shows acceptable repeatability in quantifying the DNA nano-mass with a sensitivity of 18.5 aF/ng mass of DNA based on the results described here.“