Bio-inspired microsystem for robust genetic assay recognition

A compact integrated system-on-chip (SoC) architecture solution for robust, real-time, and on-site genetic analysis has been proposed. This microsystem solution is noise-tolerable and suitable for analyzing the weak fluorescence patterns from a PCR prepared dual-labeled DNA microchip assay. In the architecture, a preceding differential logarithm stage is designed for effectively computing the logarithm of the normalized input fluorescence signals. A posterior VLSI artificial neural network (ANN) processor chip is used for analyzing the processed signals from the differential logarithm stage. A single-channel logarithmic circuit was fabricated and characterized. A prototype ANN chip with winner-take-all (WTA) function was designed, fabricated, and tested. An ANN learning algorithm using a novel sigmoid-logarithmic transfer function based on the error backpropagation (BP) algorithm is proposed for robustly recognizing low intensity patterns. Our results show the trained new ANN can recognize low fluorescence patterns better than the ANN using the conventional sigmoid function.