Expert Series

Charge Measuring Electronics in Medical Applications (Intro)

Marco Carminati

Abstract

Low-noise current and charge sensing circuits are pivotal in a large variety of biomedical instruments, spanning from electrochemical biosensors to photodetectors for visible and gamma radiation. In this tutorial, the common electronic design challenges and guidelines will be discussed, for circuits detecting charge and current, with special focus on front-end CMOS ASICs. Key aspects of the signal readout chain will be discussed spanning from the front-end to the back-end processing for charge, current and impedance sensing. Applicative examples will focus on diagnostics, both from the (apparently opposite) perspectives of electrochemical nano-biosensors, leveraging molecular affinity (miniaturized and integrated with lab-on-chip microfluidics), monitoring single cells, as well as up to hospital-based scanners for multi-modal medical imaging.

Keywords: Impedance, low-noise, analog electronics, charge detection, lab-on-chip, bio-sensors.

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Presenter

Marco Carminati

Politecnico di Milano

Italy

Marco Carminati

Biography

Marco Carminati was born in 1981 in Milan (Italy). He received B. Sc. and M. Sc. in Electronic Engineering, both magna cum laude from Politecnico di Milano, in 2003 and 2005 respectively. In 2006 he joined the Dept. of Electronics of Politecnico di Milano developing a compact aircraft attitude estimation unit based on MEMS inertial sensors and Kalman filtering. In January 2007 he won (first position in the ranking) a national grant for his doctoral studies, which he completed in 2009, focusing on low-noise analog design and (bio)-electronic instrumentation. In 2007 he was awarded a Progetto Roberto Rocca Fellowship and spent the 2008 spring semester at MIT (USA) as a visiting student in prof. Joel Voldman’s group, working on BioMEMS and microfluidics. From 2010 to 2015 he was post-doc researcher in the group of prof. Marco Sampietro contributing to the invention of original micro-sensors based on high-resolution impedance detection for silicon photonics and environmental monitoring. Since 2014 he is teacher of the “Biochip” master course and serves as secretary of the IEEE I&M TC-34. From 2016 to 2021 he was Assistant Professor in the group led by prof. Carlo Fiorini, focusing on low-noise nuclear electronics and instrumentation, with applications spanning from medical imaging to gamma and x-ray spectroscopy and to neutrino physics throigh the deployment of solid-state radiation detectors. Since 2021 he is Associate Professor with tenure and national coordinator of the INFN TRISTAN project. He has authored 240 peer-reviewed international publications (2200 citations, h-index = 24), holds 4 patents and was awarded 3 best paper awards at IEEE conferences. He is IEEE Senior Member and serves as Associate Editor of IEEE TBioCAS. He is also TPC member of different conferences including IWIS, IEEE ICECS and BioCAS.

Affiliation(s)

Politecnico di Milano

Italy