Low-power wireless on-chip microparticle manipulation with process variation compensation

Abstract

A chip with which to manipulate microparticles using wireless power transfer and pulse-driven dielectrophoresis has been designed and fabricated using a 0.18-µm CMOS process. The chip enables microparticle manipulation using a 0.35-V power supply and a 10∼100kHz clock, which are generated on the chip by means of an on-chip coil, a rectifier and a ring oscillator circuit with process variation compensation circuits. The proposed process variation compensation with effective gate-width tuning as well as body biasing can achieve stable 0.35-V operation, allowing a 87% reduction in the power consumption of digital circuits on the chip compared to previous work.