Soliton Electronics and Biolab-on-Chip
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Date: 10-07-2005
Start Time:
2:00pm
End Time: 3:00pm
Speaker: Prof. Donhee Ham
From:
Harvard University
Location: 13th Floor Dept. of EE Conference Room, Mudd
Hosted by:
Integrated System Laboratory
This talk consists of two topics, that have been important research foci in my lab.
In the first part of this talk, I will present the first stable self-sustained electrical soliton oscillator that we have recently developed. The soliton oscillator consisting of a nonlinear transmission line (NLTL) and a nonlinear amplifier that "tames" the instability-prone dynamics of the NLTL self-starts by amplifying background noise to generate a stable soliton train in steady-state. While the NLTL has been extensively exploited as a sharp soliton pulse generator in the past decades, this traditional approach utilizes the NLTL as a 2-port system that requires an external high-frequency input to generate the soliton output. Our soliton oscillator is a self-contained 1-port system that does not require any external high-frequency input in generation of the soliton train. The soliton oscillator, as a direct analogue of the optical soliton mode-locked system such as the soliton fiber ring laser, is expected to find a variety of applications in high-speed metrology.
The second part of this talk covers a CMOS/microfluidic hybrid microsystem, which our group is developing as a new biolab-on-IC in collaboration with Westervelt group at Harvard. The hybrid system consists of a CMOS chip and a microfluidic system fabricated on top. A microcoil array circuit in the CMOS chip produces a spatially-patterned microscopic magnetic field pattern to simultaneously manipulate multiple individual biological cells (tagged by magnetic beads) suspended inside the microfluidic system. Fullying exploiting the programmability and speed of the CMOS chip, the manipulation operations are performed with low power and high spatial manipulation resolution. The hybrid system may be used as a micro cellular assembler.