Custom IC Platforms

Many of the most important problems in biology, chemistry, and the life sciences are limited not by ideas but by the throughput, precision, and cost of the instruments used to study them. A CMOS chip can place thousands of electrodes, sensors, and actuators on a few square millimeters of silicon and control each one independently, turning a benchtop process into a massively parallel, electronically programmable one. This capability has enabled electrochemical imaging and parallel molecular synthesis directly on a chip, and it opens a path toward laboratory functions that are faster, smaller, and more accessible than conventional equipment.

Realizing these platforms requires circuit design that is tailored to each application rather than drawn from a standard catalog. Electrode arrays must drive and sense currents from nanoamperes to milliamperes while remaining stable in contact with liquids, temperature controllers must hold reaction sites within fractions of a degree, and the entire system must be packaged to survive chemical and biological environments. Our work builds such custom IC platforms in close collaboration with researchers in other disciplines, combining mixed-signal design, electrode-array architectures, and system integration to deliver chips that serve as instruments in their own right for interdisciplinary research.

• Research Interests: Electrochemical ICs, electrode-array CMOS, and custom ICs for interdisciplinary applications

• Publications:

  • [Nature Electronics 2026] Parallel enzymatic DNA synthesis using a semiconductor chip

  • [AAAS Sci. Adv. 2022] CMOS electrochemical pH localizer-imager