We present a portable, battery-operated and application-specific lab-on-a-chip (ASLOC) system that can be easily configured for a wide range of lab-on-a-chip applications. It is based on multiplexed electrical current detection that serves as the sensing system. We demonstrate different configurations to perform most detection schemes currently in use in LOC systems, including some of the most advanced such as nanowire-based biosensing, surface plasmon resonance sensing, electrochemical detection and real-time PCR. The complete system is controlled by a single chip and the collected information is stored in situ, with the option of transferring the data to an external display by using a USB interface. In addition to providing a framework for truly portable real-life developments of LOC systems, we envisage that this system will have a significant impact on education, especially since it can easily demonstrate the benefits of integrated microanalytical systems.

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Bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filters have been extensively used in consumer products for mobile communication systems due to their high performance and standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) compatible integration process. However, it is challenging for a traditional aluminum nitride (AlN)-based BAW filter to meet several allocated 5G bands with more than a 5% fractional bandwidth via an acoustic-only approach. In this work, we propose an Al0.8Sc0.2N-based film bulk acoustic wave resonator (FBAR) for the design of radio frequency (RF) filters. By taking advantage of a high-quality Al0.8Sc0.2N thin film, the fabricated resonators demonstrate a large Keff2 of 14.5% and an excellent figure of merit (FOM) up to 62. The temperature coefficient of frequency (TCF) of the proposed resonator is measured to be −19.2 ppm/°C, indicating excellent temperature stability. The fabricated filter has a center frequency of 4.24 GHz, a −3 dB bandwidth of 215 MHz, a small insertion loss (IL) of 1.881 dB, and a rejection >32 dB. This work paves the way for the realization of wideband acoustic filters operating in the 5G band.

This report introduces a bleaching-independent temperature measurement method based on the analysis of the fluorescence emitted during the melting of DNA molecules with the SYBR-Green I intercalator, in a microvolume where the strong non-linearity of the signal is used to eliminate the photobleaching effect as well as to determine the heat transfer rate between a heater and the sample and the temperature non-uniformity within the sample.

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Film Bulk Acoustic Wave Resonators (FBAR) at 2.6GHz using AlN piezoelectric material have been fabricated and characterized in this work. A stack of Al bottom electrode, AlN layer and top Al electrode is used to excite the thickness extensional (TE) vibration mode. The FBAR resonator has a quality factor of about 400 and the piezoelectric coupling coefficient of 4.25%, which is critical for RF filter implementation. Moreover, FBAR resonator has been designed to suppress spurious modes in order to ensure higher quality factor. Different filter topologies of ladder/lattice architecture are then explored for effective implementation using several FBAR resonators to build band-pass RF filters.

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