Body Dust: Miniaturized Highly-integrated Low Power Sensing for Remotely Powered Drinkable CMOS Bioelectronics

TL;DR

This paper explores the technological advancements and challenges in developing ultra-miniaturized, autonomous CMOS bio-electronic sensors, called Body Dust, capable of circulating in human tissues for disease detection and wireless diagnostics.

Contribution

It presents the theoretical feasibility of creating sub-10 micrometer CMOS biosensors for in-body diagnostics, highlighting current technological limits and future challenges.

Findings

Current CMOS technology approaches the size needed for Body Dust.

Theoretical models support the possibility of sub-10 um CMOS biosensors.

Challenges remain in fabrication and integration at this scale.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to introduce current advances in technology that could enable the development of fully drinkable and autonomous bio-electronic CMOS sensors in the form of dust particles, capable of identifying the source of a disease by targeting a specific region in organs and tissue such as a tumor mass and automatically sending diagnostic information wirelessly outside the body. We call this swarm of sensing dust particles Body Dust. A diagnostic system in the form of Body Dust would need to be small enough to support free circulation in human tissues, which requires a total size of less than 10 um3, in order to mimic the typical sizes of a blood cell (e.g., red cells have the diameter around 7 {\mu}m). Whilst with present state-of-the-art in CMOS technology, this requirement in terms of size is currently un-feasible, recent research has advanced technology such that we can begin to work towards such an approach. Therefore, we present here the current limits of CMOS technology as well as the challenges related to the development of such a system. Towards this goal, this article presents the theoretical feasibility to obtain the first ever-conceived sub-10-um Bio/CMOS integrated circuit with biosensing capability to provide diagnostic telemetry once self-located in human tissue.