Development of an innovative electrolytes characterization approach using a combined COMSOL/MATLAB/HSPICE system

When developing microelectronic devices for biological applications it is often useful to simulate heterogeneous environments, e.g. metal electrodes in contact with aqueous electrolytes or living cells electrically stimulated. Both in the former and in the latter arises the influence of thin layers like electrodes polarization sheets and cell membranes. The numeric simulation of these systems using finite element method (FEM)-based programs often implies the use of large amounts of resources and time, and it suffers of convergence and data preconditioning issues. The combined simulation system (CSS) presented in this work allow to simulate bidimensional systems with appropriate thin layers overcoming these problems by using both the features of three well-known programs, i.e. COMSOL Multiphysics, MATLAB and HSPICE, and the information achievable with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measures performed on Ayanda multi electrode array devices.