Online Monitoring and Portable Analytical System with CMOS Sensor and Microfluidic Technology for Cell Cultivation Applications

This paper presents about the design and fabrication of a cost effective and portable system for real time monitoring and data analysis of cell cultivation applications based on CMOS sensor and microfluidic technology. The digital CMOS sensor has 2-Mpixel resolution and output digital data that is designed and fabricated on the 0.18um CMOS image process. The Chip has integrated with low noise 2 shared 2.25T pinned photodiode active pixel, noise reduction circuit, analog to digital converter and timing control circuits. The module based on the 2-Mpixel CMOS sensor has two focuses that can capture the image of the business card so that the monitoring system is so compact and low power. In this paper, one microfluidic product has been fabricated based on the MEMS process that applies for cell cultivation. The online monitoring and analytical system uses CMOS image sensor to capture the image of the microfluidic applications and a field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip to process the captured image. The final image can be displayed in the monitor or be sent to computer to be stored. This technique can be utilized in monitoring the cell size lying on the pixel size of CMOS sensor. In this paper, the monitoring cell size is large than 2.8um for the pixel size of CMOS sensor is 2.8um. The advantages of this system not only provide miniaturization and minimum cost, but also offer many advantages over conventional laboratory experiments, such as low energy LED light, parallel and fast microfluidic chip, high resolution CMOS sensor, fast and accurate test, low cost and consumption, etc.