A 460 800 Pixels CMOS Capacitive Sensor Array With Programmable Fusion Pixels and Noise Canceling for Life Science Applications

Capacitive sensor array (CSA) plays an important role in life science applications, such as cell monitoring, DNA detection, or drug screening. This brief presents a $480\times 960$ time-sharing TDC (ts-TDC) architecture of global shutter CSA. It provides an opportunity to merge interfacing, read-out and sampling circuits in pixel and dynamically adjust the electrode size according to the characteristic of biosample. Each pixel size is within $2.25\times 2.25\,\,\mu m^{2}$ . The sensitivity of the proposed CSA is 6.896 codes/fF, and 43 fps can be adopted for real-time monitoring. Experiment results show that noise canceling significantly improves the sensing performance. Moreover, sensitivity can be optimized by given fusion-pixel pattern, making our proposal very flexible and suitable for cell biology applications and personalized medicine.