Point-of-use biological/chemical assays are aimed to transform the bulky laboratory instruments into facile lab-on-a-chip platforms, bringing down the cost, size and sample-use by orders of magnitude. A micro-Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) CMOS transceiver enables repeatable, versatile and low cost screening of samples as it is label-/washing-free, and immobilization-free for the electrodes. Herein, two lab-on-CMOS NMR systems are presented: the first facilitates multi-step multi-sample management by electronic-automated digital microfluidics, whereas the second benefits from magnetic-field stabilization and thermal management to unify multi-type assays (target detection, protein state analysis and solvent-polymer dynamics) in a handheld scale suitable for healthcare, food industry and colloidal applications. The detection limit is down to 50pM for E. faecalis derived DNA. The platform consumes 120x less sample, and is 96x lighter, 175x smaller and 16x cheaper than a 135kg commercial product.
Pui-In (Elvis) Mak received the Ph.D. degree from University of Macau (UM), Macao, China, in 2006. He is currently Full Professor at UM Faculty of Science and Technology – ECE, and Associate Director (Research) at the UM State Key Laboratory of Analog and Mixed-Signal VLSI. His research interests are on analog and radio-frequency (RF) circuits and systems for wireless and multidisciplinary innovations.
He is currently the Associate Editor of IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (’18-) and IEEE Solid-State Circuits Letters (’17-). He is/was the TPC Member of A-SSCC (’13-’16), ESSCIRC (’16-’17) and ISSCC (’17-’19). He is/was Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (’14-’15) and IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (’17-’18). He was inducted as an Overseas Expert of the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2018. He is a Fellow of the IET and IEEE.
Prof. Howard Luong (eeluong@ust.hk)