Integration of CMOS Biosensor into a Polymeric Lab-on-a-Chip System

We present an integration approach of a CMOS biosensor into a polymer based microfluidic environment suitable for mass production. It consists of a wafer-level-package for the silicon die and laser bonding process promoted by an intermediate hot melt foil to attach the sensor package to the microfluidic chip, without the need for dispensing of glues or underfiller. A very good condition of the sensing area was obtained after introducing a protection layer during packaging. A microfluidic flow cell was fabricated and shown to withstand pressures up to Δp = 780 kPa without leakage. The employed biosensors were electrically characterized in a dry environment.

Bandwidth, Area Efficient and Target Device Independent DDR SDRAM Controller

The application of the synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) has gone beyond the scope of personal computers for quite a long time. It comes into hand whenever a big amount of low price and still high speed memory is needed. Most of the newly developed stand alone embedded devices in the field of image, video and sound processing take more and more use of it. The big amount of low price memory has its trade off – the speed. In order to take use of the full potential of the memory, an efficient controller is needed. Efficient stands for maximum random accesses to the memory both for reading and writing and less area after implementation. This paper proposes a target device independent DDR SDRAM pipelined controller and provides performance comparison with available solutions.

Post Occupancy Life Cycle Analysis of a Green Building Energy Consumption at the University of Western Ontario in London - Canada

The CMLP building was developed to be a model for sustainability with strategies to reduce water, energy and pollution, and to provide a healthy environment for the building occupants. The aim of this paper is to investigate the environmental effects of energy used by this building. A LCA (life cycle analysis) was led to measure the real environmental effects produced by the use of energy. The impact categories most affected by the energy use were found to be the human health effects, as well as ecotoxicity. Natural gas extraction, uranium milling for nuclear energy production, and the blasting for mining and infrastructure construction are the processes contributing the most to emissions in the human health effect. Data comparing LCA results of CMLP building with a conventional building results showed that energy used by the CMLP building has less damage for the environment and human health than a conventional building.