Abstract
Electronics is a field of study ubiquitous in our daily lives, since this discipline is undoubtedly the driving force behind developments in many other disciplines, such as telecommunications, automation, and computer science. Nowadays, electronics is becoming more and more widely applied in life science, thus leading to an increasing interest in bioelectronics that is a major segment of bioengineering. A bioelectronics application that has gained much attention in recent years is the use of sensors for biological samples, with emphasis given to biosensors performing broadband sensing of small-volume liquid samples. Within this context, this work aims at investigating a microfluidic sensor based on a broadband one-port coplanar interdigital capacitor (IDC). The microwave performance of the sensor loaded with lossless materials under test (MUTs) is achieved by using finite-element method (FEM) simulations carried out with Ansoft’s high frequency structure simulator (HFSS). The microfluidic channel for the MUT has a volume capacity of 0.054 μL. The FEM simulations show a resonance in the admittance that is reproduced with a five-lumped-element equivalent-circuit model. By changing the real part of the relative permittivity of the MUT up to 70, the corresponding variations in both the resonant frequency of the FEM simulations and the capacitance of the equivalent-circuit model are analyzed, thereby enabling assessment of the permittivity sensitivity of the studied IDC. Furthermore, it is shown that, although the proposed local equivalent-circuit model is able to mimic faithfully the FEM simulations locally around the resonance in the admittance, a higher number of circuit elements can achieve a better agreement between FEM and equivalent-circuit simulation over the entire broad frequency going range from 0.3 MHz to 35 GHz.
Highlights
Bioelectronics is an interdisciplinary research field that bridges electronics and life sciences.The first steps of bioelectronics date back to Galvani’s electrical experiments on frogs in the second half of the 18th century [1]
To underpin this rapid expansion, growing attention is being paid to the study and design of microwave electronics devices, circuits, and systems, thereby enabling the development of microwave electronics techniques oriented to applications in life sciences
Among the various applications in which high-frequency sensors can be useful, there is a significant use of microwave biological sensors in dielectric spectroscopy
Summary
Bioelectronics is an interdisciplinary research field that bridges electronics and life sciences.The first steps of bioelectronics date back to Galvani’s electrical experiments on frogs in the second half of the 18th century [1]. To underpin this rapid expansion, growing attention is being paid to the study and design of microwave electronics devices, circuits, and systems, thereby enabling the development of microwave electronics techniques oriented to applications in life sciences. In this context, a pivotal role is played by high-frequency sensors, going from radar systems (e.g., [2,3,4,5,6]) to biological sensors (e.g., [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]). This is because the planar structures have the advantage of being easy to fabricate and integrate with microfluidic channels, especially when compared to bulky and expensive non-planar resonator structures
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