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July 00 SCOTTISH RESEARCHERS WIN GRANT OF £1.3 MILLION FOR LAB ON A CHIP/SYSTEM ON CHIP PROJECT The Institute for System Level Integration has joined forces with researchers at the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Strathclyde who have won £1.3 million in the latest round of Research Development Grants announced by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council. The team will be working to develop miniature, integrated sensory and analytical systems. The research funding will enable them to link 'lab-on-a-chip' and system-on-chip research to build powerful measurement tools for environmental, medical and industrial applications. The project is headed by Dr David Cumming from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Glasgow. It will create thumb-nail sized sensors that can be swallowed or dropped into the environment to be measured - the chemical and biological equivalent of the recent breakthrough 'camera-in-a-pill' device. The sensor systems have applications in environmental, medical and industrial monitoring and will communicate with remote centres of expertise for diagnosis and follow-up action. The research project extends well beyond mere technology development. A community of medical, veterinary and water-supply researchers will explore the use of the technology in close collaboration with the engineering team, to identify the new services and opportunities that it offers. Research will focus on system-on-chip integration - to put data analysis and instrumentation circuits on to a single piece of silicon, and lab-on-a-chip technology - to build complex laboratory sensors and sample handling on to a glass or silicon plate. The programme has attracted wide support within Scotland from medical, microelectronics, biotechnology and water-supply interests, as well as from multinational companies such as Motorola and Kodak. Based at the Institute's design facility in Livingston, Scotland, researchers will work on a demonstrator system which will comprise a diagnostic chip/hybrid with a sensory interface, adaptive analogue and digital data processing and a radio up-link to a base station. To demonstrate true system-level capability, relatively simple sensors for light, temperature and pH making use of both silicon and lab-on-chip sensory technologies will be deployed. The base station will provide control and diagnostic functions together with a communications capability to convey information to remote sites via the Internet or mobile telephone connections. The consortium comprises research groups with expertise in silicon and lab-on-chip design together with medical and veterinary users for the demonstrator system. It is expected that the project will involve not only leading edge research but also the prospect of commercial exploitation. |
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