A novel method to design an electro-kinetic platform based on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor technology using SKILL scripting of cadence

Abstract

The dielectrophoresis (DEP) is the motion of polarizable particles which is a result of the interaction between a non-uniform electric field and the induced dipole moment of these particles. The electro-kinetic DEP is a widely used technique for biological cells’ manipulation, characterization and separation. The electro-kinetic DEP consists of three major configurations, they are; traveling wave dielectrophoresis (twDEP), electro-rotation dielectrophoresis (rotDEP), and levitation (levDEP). In this paper, a design of electrokinetic platform that includes the three electrokinetic configurations is presented and discussed. The design of the electrokinetic platform is implemented and simulated using 130nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Also, this paper presents a developed technique to design the electrokinetic platform's electrodes. This developed technique is the usage of SKILL scripting of cadence (SSC) language. CMOS is a technology which is used to fabricate integrated circuits (IC). SKILL is a scripting language which supports the automation of a specific layout design by commands. The layout of electrokinetic DEP platform is developed using SSC. The performance of the developed electrokinetic platform using SSC versus the platforms based on the other traditional techniques is presented and evaluated using COMSOL Multiphysics®.