Design of custom CMOS amplifiers for nanoscale bio-interfaces

The miniaturization of electronics is a technique that holds a lot of potential in improving system performance in a variety of applications. The simultaneous miniaturization of sensors into the nano-scale has provided new ways to probe biological systems. Careful co-design of these electronics and sensors can unlock measurements and experiments that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. This thesis describes the design of two such instrumentation amplifiers and shows that significant gains in temporal resolution and noise performance are possible through careful optimization. A custom integrated amplifier is developed for improving the temporal resolution in nanopore recordings. The amplifier is designed in a commercial 0.18 μm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process. A platform is then built with the amplifier at its core that integrates glass-passivated solid-state nanopores to achieve measurement bandwidth over an order of magnitude greater than the state of the art. The use of wavelet transforms for denoising the data and further improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is then explored. A second amplifier is designed in a 0.18 μm CMOS process for intracellular recordings from neurons. The amplifier contains all the compensation circuitry required for canceling the effects of the electrode non-idealities. Compared to equivalent commercial systems and the state of the art, the amplifier performs comparably or better while consuming orders of magnitude lower power. These systems can inform the design of extremely miniaturized application-specific integrated amplifiers of the future

C++ game development by example: learn to build games and graphics with SFML, OpenGL, and Vulkan using C++ programming

This book will get you up to speed with the specifics of making games look and feel great, by using modern animation and rendering techniques with the integration of great physics libraries for an improved and realistic user experience

Swift game development: learn iOS 12 game development using SpriteKit, SceneKit, and ARKit 2.0

"Die Stadt Köln kann mit der Planung für den Neubau des Historischen Archivs beginnen. Wie Baudezernent Bernd Streitberger mitgeteilt hat, sind Beschwerden wegen des Vergabeverfahrens an ein Architekturbüro erledigt. Eine Beschwerde hat die Vergabekammer zurückgewiesen, die andere wurde zurück gezogen. Das rchitekturbüro "Waechter und Waechter" hatte im April den Wettbewerb zum Neubau des Stadtarchivs gewonnen. Jetzt kann der Auftrag offiziell an das Büro vergeben werden." Quelle: WDR-Text, S..

High bandwidth approaches in nanopore and ion channel recordings - A tutorial review.

Transport processes through ion-channel proteins, protein pores, or solid-state nanopores are traditionally recorded with commercial patch-clamp amplifiers. The bandwidth of these systems is typically limited to 10 kHz by signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) considerations associated with these measurement platforms. At high bandwidth, the input-referred current noise in these systems dominates, determined by the input-referred voltage noise of the transimpedance amplifier applied across the capacitance at the input of the amplifier. This capacitance arises from several sources: the parasitic capacitance of the amplifier itself; the capacitance of the lipid bilayer harboring the ion channel protein (or the membrane used to form the solid-state nanopore); and the capacitance from the interconnections between the electronics and the membrane. Here, we review state-of-the-art applications of high-bandwidth conductance recordings of both ion channels and solid-state nanopores. These approaches involve tightly integrating measurement electronics fabricated in complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) technology with lipid bilayer or solid-state membranes. SNR improvements associated with this tight integration push the limits of measurement bandwidths, in some cases in excess of 10 MHz. Recent case studies demonstrate the utility of these approaches for DNA sequencing and ion-channel recordings. In the latter case, studies with extended bandwidth have shown the potential for providing new insights into structure-function relations of these ion-channel proteins as the temporal resolutions of functional recordings matches time scales achievable with state-of-the-art molecular dynamics simulations

Single-channel recordings of RyR1 at microsecond resolution in CMOS-suspended membranes

Single-channel recordings are widely used to explore functional properties of ion channels. Typically, such recordings are performed at bandwidths of less than 10 kHz because of signal-to-noise considerations, limiting the temporal resolution available for studying fast gating dynamics to greater than 100 µs. Here we present experimental methods that directly integrate suspended lipid bilayers with high-bandwidth, low-noise transimpedance amplifiers based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuits (IC) technology to achieve bandwidths in excess of 500 kHz and microsecond temporal resolution. We use this CMOS-integrated bilayer system to study the type 1 ryanodine receptor (RyR1), a Ca2+-activated intracellular Ca2+-release channel located on the sarcoplasmic reticulum. We are able to distinguish multiple closed states not evident with lower bandwidth recordings, suggesting the presence of an additional Ca2+ binding site, distinct from the site responsible for activation. An extended beta distribution analysis of our high-bandwidth data can be used to infer closed state flicker events as fast as 35 ns. These events are in the range of single-file ion translocations