Events Calendar

Integrated Systems Seminar Series

Speaker: Dr. Arjang Hassibi, University of Texas at Austin

Talk Title: CMOS ICs in Biotechnology

Abstract: The recent advances in biotechnology are largely due to the progress in bio-molecular detection and analysis platforms, especially in microarray, DNA sequencing, and qPCR technologies. However, the detection performance of these platforms (SNR, dynamic range, response time, throughput, and etc.) as well as their instrumentation complexity are far from the ideal. It is fair to say that there is no technology today that can satisfy the stringent requirements of applications such as personal medicine, point-of-care (PoC) molecular diagnostics, and real-time environmental monitoring.

Recently, a new technology trend has emerged in bio-electronics which promises not only detection sensitivity, but also integration and manufacturability. The general idea is to leverage the capabilities of conventional silicon VLSI fabrication technologies, i.e. CMOS processes, to build ICs that can act as the backbone for bio-molecular analysis platforms. Some examples are CMOS integrated microarrays and high-throughput DNA sequence-by-synthesis systems. The focus of this talk is to introduce this technology trend and discuss its advantages and limitations.


Biography: Arjang Hassibi is an Assistant Professor at the ECE Department and the Institute for Cellular Biology of the University of Texas at Austin. Arjang received the B.Sc. degree with the highest honors from the University of Tehran, Iran (1997), and the M.S. (2001) and Ph.D. degrees (2005) from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. Prior to becoming a faculty he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at California Institute of Technology and also the co-founder and director of engineering of Xagros Genomics, where he co-invented the technology behind Ion Torrent electronic DNA sequencing platform. He has also held research positions at the Functional Genomics group of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Stanford Genome Technology Center. His main research interests are in the intersection of IC design and biotechnology.

Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi and Firooz Aflatouni

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Hossein Hashemi