New Perspectives and Opportunities From the Wild West of Microelectronic Biochips

TL;DR

This paper discusses the emerging field of microelectronic biochips for bioanalysis, highlighting new design challenges and opportunities, especially in fluidic and packaging aspects, based on practical development experience.

Contribution

It provides a new perspective on biochip design, emphasizing experimental approaches and the relaxation of traditional constraints in fluidic and packaging design.

Findings

New design constraints for biochips are identified.

Experimental approaches are crucial for biochip development.

Traditional electronic design flows can be adapted for biochips.

Abstract

Application of Microelectronic to bioanalysis is an emerging field which holds great promise. From the standpoint of electronic and system design, biochips imply a radical change of perspective, since new, completely different constraints emerge while other usual constraints can be relaxed. While electronic parts of the system can rely on the usual established design-flow, fluidic and packaging design, calls for a new approach which relies significantly on experiments. We hereby make some general considerations based on our experience in the development of biochips for cell analysis.