A 16 x 16 CMOS Amperometric Microelectrode Array for Simultaneous Electrochemical Measurements

Abstract

There is a requirement for an electrochemical sensor technology capable of making multivariate measurements in environmental, healthcare, and manufacturing applications. Here, we present a new device that is highly parallelized with an excellent bandwidth. For the first time, electrochemical cross-talk for a chip-based sensor is defined and characterized. The new CMOS electrochemical sensor chip is capable of simultaneously taking multiple, independent electroanalytical measurements. The chip is structured as an electrochemical cell microarray, comprised of a microelectrode array connected to embedded self-contained potentiostats. Speed and sensitivity are essential in dynamic variable electrochemical systems. Owing to the parallel function of the system, rapid data collection is possible while maintaining an appropriately low-scan rate. By performing multiple, simultaneous cyclic voltammetry scans in each of the electrochemical cells on the chip surface, we are able to show (with a cell-to-cell pitch of 456 µm) that the signal cross-talk is only 12% between nearest neighbors in a ferrocene rich solution. The system opens up the possibility to use multiple independently controlled electrochemical sensors on a single chip for applications in DNA sensing, medical diagnostics, environmental sensing, the food industry, neuronal sensing, and drug discovery.

A Scalable 128-Channel, Time-Multiplexed Potentiostat for Parallel Electrochemical Experiments

“…However, potential control was only supported for a twoelectrode setup which does not shield the WE response from the CE behavior [9]. In [17], a three-electrode MEA was presented with 256 electrodes and 16 stimulation units. Again, the number of stimulation channels was much lower than the number of sensing channels.…”

“…In comparison with the state-the-art MEAs [17][18][19]29], this work contains 2× more individual stimulation channels. The number of parallel channels, equal to the number of stimulation channels, is less than some of the previous work.…”

“…The state of the art focuses on increasing the number of sensing channels for spatial information retrieval in socalled microelectrode arrays (MEAs) (Fig. 1b) [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. The absence of multiple stimulation channels however results in no support for an unique stimulation pattern for each channel.…”

CMOS Interfaces for Internet-of-Wearables Electrochemical Sensors: Trends and Challenges

“…Fully differential topologies such as those in Figures 10c have also been proposed [131][132][133]. The solution in [133] replaces all the gray area in Figures 10c with a fully-differential difference amplifier (FDDA). Analytically, considering the Randles model of Figure 5 and considering that no redox process is present at CE,…”

The Multicorder: A Handheld Multimodal Metabolomics-on-CMOS Sensing Platform

“…CMOS technology has also been utilized for Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) measurements [17] and ISFET-based DNA sequencing [18]. Also, Electrochemical microelectrode arrays have been demonstrated to be suitable for metabolites detection [19]. In the last decade, as a result of the maturity of the technology, a large interest in multimodal CMOS chip has risen.…”