Event
BIOE Seminar: BioChips: Leveraging Integrated Circuits for Sensing, Medicine, and Science
Friday, February 13, 2026
10:00 a.m.
A. James Clark Hall, Room #2121
Ian White
ianwhite@umd.edu
Pamela Abshire
Chair and Professor
Stony Brook University
Abstract
The stellar success of microelectronics in the last few decades is largely due to increasing miniaturization and integration, which produces a steady stream of new applications, innovations, and products. An emerging research area that leverages these advances is lab-on-CMOS (LoCMOS) systems, highly integrated, multiphysics microsystems that place instrumentation in intimate contact with sensing and actuation capabilities. They are an extension of lab-on-a-chip (LOC) systems, miniaturized devices that integrate several laboratory functions onto a single “chip” – but the “chips” in LOC systems are usually passive substrates, and the only active components are the chemistry and the microfluidics. By integrating active electronics into passive LOC systems, LoCMOS systems tie the sensing closely to signal processing, detection, and actuation, reducing the need for external instrumentation and leading to overall systems with significantly smaller size and also the potential for novel measurements that cannot be performed using traditional approaches.
This talk will provide an overview of LoCMOS systems and technology and a detailed introduction to LoCMOS capacitance imagers, a novel sensing modality that measures the cell-substrate coupling of living cells in culture. The electrical properties of biological cells and tissues correlate strongly with their morphological and physiological states. The capacitive coupling of cells to planar electrodes embedded in a CMOS substrate has been shown to correlate well with many important cellular phenomena, revealing distinct signatures for cellular events including adhesion, viability, proliferation, motility, mitosis, drug responses, and death. As cells adhere to the surface over the electrodes, the underlying circuitry modulates weak electric fields to detect changes in the coupling capacitance. This provides a label-free approach to monitoring indidivual cultured cells with high spatial and temporal resolution. Cell capacitance arrays have been developed in standard CMOS processes with digital readout through standard communication interfaces. The integration of diagnostic sensors into biomedical devices poses a number of distinct and vexing challenges, including packaging, surface fouling, sterilization, communication, and system power. By establishing dense and information-rich interfaces with cultured cells, capacitance imaging offers the potential for disruptive changes in biosensing and medical diagnostics in the near future.
Bio
Pamela Abshire is Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University. She received the BS in Physics from the California Institute of Technology, and the MS and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. In between CalTech and JHU, she worked for the biomedical device company Medtronic. Before joining Stony Brook, she was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute of Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is internationally known for her work in low power mixed-signal integrated circuits (IC), adaptive ICs and IC sensors, and CMOS biosensors. Her research focuses on better understanding and exploiting the tradeoffs between performance and resources in natural and engineered systems, including hybrid devices incorporating CMOS, MEMS, optoelectronics, microfluidics, and biological components. Her honors include an NSF CAREER award, elevation to IEEE Fellow for contributions to CMOS biosensors, and recognition as a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland. She has authored 150+ publications and 3 patents. She served on the Emerging Technologies and Research Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Commerce, on the Board of Governors for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (3 terms), the IEEE Fellow Committee, as General Co-Chair for the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, on the Microsystems Exploratory Council for the DARPA Microsystem Technology Office, and as General Co-Chair for the 2023 IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems.
