From Cleanroom to Desktop: Emerging Micro-Nanofabrication Technology for Biomedical Applications

This review is motivated by the growing demand for low-cost, easy-to-use, compact-size yet powerful micro-nanofabrication technology to address emerging challenges of fundamental biology and translational medicine in regular laboratory settings. Recent advancements in the field benefit considerably from rapidly expanding material selections, ranging from inorganics to organics and from nanoparticles to self-assembled molecules. Meanwhile a great number of novel methodologies, employing off-the-shelf consumer electronics, intriguing interfacial phenomena, bottom-up self-assembly principles, etc., have been implemented to transit micro-nanofabrication from a cleanroom environment to a desktop setup. Furthermore, the latest application of micro-nanofabrication to emerging biomedical research will be presented in detail, which includes point-of-care diagnostics, on-chip cell culture as well as bio-manipulation. While significant progresses have been made in the rapidly growing field, both apparent and unrevealed roadblocks will need to be addressed in the future. We conclude this review by offering our perspectives on the current technical challenges and future research opportunities

Parsing using the PARSEC Vector Processing Chip

This paper describes the implementation of the PARSEC 1 chip, a vector processing element (PE) for parsing languages. This chip has applications not only in natural language processing, but can also be applied to other constraint satisfaction problems. The PARSEC chip is based on a parsing algorithm which formerly ran in real time on a massively parallel machine [4]; however, the chip can achieve processing speeds fast enough for real-time language processing systems, while at the same time, having a price and form suitable for mass market applications. Key Words: artificial intelligence architectures and applications, VLSI A key component of any natural language interface is its parsing algorithm. Because some features of English (e.g., context) are clumsy or impossible to handle using existing parsers, we have extended and implemented a parsing algorithm based on a new, flexible grammatical formalism, called Constraint Dependency Grammar (CDG), introduced by Maruyama [5, 6, 7]. Th..