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Design and Simulation of pH-ISFET Readout Circuit for Low Thermal Sensitivity Applications Through an Automatic Selection of an Isothermal Point

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a high-performance pH-ISFET readout circuit, which carries out a temperature insensitivity, linearity and temporal drift compensation, by using a new architecture that automates the control of an isothermal point. Unlike many existing readout circuits in the literature, this circuit can be optimized for several isothermal pH values as desired and for any structure compatible with the standard ISFET sensor. To eliminate the effect of the temporal drift, generally observed in ISFET type sensors, the same readout circuit was used in conjunction with Machine Learning (ML) implementation. The ML model was trained using a dataset from simulations performed using the ISFET macro-model including the drift effect. Through simulations, we show that the proposed scheme reduces drastically the temperature sensitivity of the sensor to less than \(1.5\times 10^{-4}\,{\mathrm{pH}}/^{\circ }{\mathrm{C}}\) for pH \(\pm \,2\) around any isothermal point at a wide pH range (from 1 to 12). For small changes of the pH around the isothermal point, the readout circuit outperforms many other designs with a thermal sensibility of less than \(3.2\times 10^{-6}\,{\mathrm{pH}}/^\circ {\mathrm{C}}\). Results show that the system was able to predict the long-term behavior of the pH-ISFET (several days) with a relative error, of the output, that not exceed \(0.19\%\) for the 3-sigma testing.

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  1. ERSETI Laboratory, National School of Applied Sciences, Mohammed I University, 60000, Oujda, Morocco

    Abdelkhalak Harrak & Salah Eddine Naimi

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  1. Abdelkhalak Harrak
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Harrak, A., Naimi, S.E. Design and Simulation of pH-ISFET Readout Circuit for Low Thermal Sensitivity Applications Through an Automatic Selection of an Isothermal Point. Sens Imaging 23, 10 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11220-022-00378-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11220-022-00378-2

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