A Microsystem for Magnetic Immunoassay Based on Planar Microcoil Array

This work focuses on the circuit and system implementation of a microsystem platform for magnetic immunoassay, which is a novel type of diagnostic method using magnetic beads as labels. Three main challenges facing this work-design of a high performance sensor, packaging technique and design of integrated circuits are discussed. Planar microcoil array are exploited as sensor of magnetic beads, whereas ultra thin bottom microplate in traditional ELISA is used for the assay. Main circuits blocks include bidirectional current supply circuit, magnetic field sensing circuit and on-chip temperature sensor. Experiments using mouse IgG with different densities were performed on the proposed platform, results show that a minimum density of 100 pg/mL can be detected, which is a comparable sensitivity to conventional optical ELISA, and a quantitative relationship can be acquired in the range from 1 ng/ml to 1 ug/ml, thus this platform is suitable for quantitative analysis in practical health and environment application and has potential for medical diagnostics, food pathogen detection or water analysis.