MEMS set to change medicine at IEDM
IEDM has invited Jonathon Rothberg, a pioneering scientist and entrepreneur in massively parallel DNA sequencing, to speak and set the scene for a transformation in personalized medicine.
Rothberg, CEO of Ion Torrent Inc., a subsidiary of Life Technologies Corp., is expected to discuss how the transfer of massively parallel DNA sequencing to a CMOS MEMS platform could be expected to follow a similar path to that taken by image sensors. The invention of image sensors based on charge-coupled devices (CCDs) may have represented a technical breakthrough but the movement of image sensors on to CMOS allowed them to scales in performance and volume and reduce in cost, making them ubiquitous and transforming society. Rothberg will look forward to an era of personalized medicine based on individual genome sequencing.
IEDM, set to take place at the Washington Hilton Hotel Dec. 7 to 9, is one of the most important events in the electronic engineering calendar, but has traditionally been associated with discussing progress in fundamental analog and digital devices for electronic circuits. The advanced program, recently published, shows that in 2013 MEMS have risen in significance and at least three sessions are devoted to the topic and more than 20 individual papers. In total IEDM is set to include 215 presentations across 33 sessions.
Three sessions are devoted to MEMS and Session 8 is specifically on sensors and microsystems for biomedical applications and is made up entirely of invited papers.
After Rothberg sets the scene in paper 8.1 invited papers will be presented by authors from: the University of Michigan on biomimetic hairs sensors; EPFL at Lausanne, Switzerland, on digital approaches to electronic biochips; and Yale on the use of silicon nanowire bioFETs for the detection of bio-molecules including proteins, DNA strands and biomarkers.
The wide range of microsystems being developed for medicine is illustrated by invited papers on flexible organic devices and on implantable neural probes. The final paper in the session, to be presented by Albert van den Berg of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He is due to talk on lab-on-chip devices based on microfluidics and that work on capillary electrophoresis. These basic structures can be customized to a wide range of biomedical applications in terms of point-of-care diagnostics and working with a variety of body fluids, including blood, milk and semen.
Session 14 is devoted to biological MEMS and sensors and the first paper returns to the topic of DNA with a description of the wafer-scale integration of circuits with sub-20nm nanofluidic channels for the manipulation and imaging of single DNA molecules. The paper is being prepared by a large team from IBM’s Thomas Watson Research Center. A paper from authors from Hitach High Technologies Corp. has been selected on a side-gated nanopore FET for direct DNA sequencing.
The third MEMS session, session 18, is about the progress of MEMS for non-biological applications such as resonators for use in oscillators, for use as sensors and the use of MEMS for tuning of solid-state lasers.
While IEDM 2013 overall retains its focus on electronic circuits including analog, logic and memory there is an increasing diversity with energy harvesting, power, magnetics, circuits for displays and MEMS well represented.
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