A 376μW per-channel, Drift-tolerant Translocation Recording Frontend with Event Detection for Nanopore Sensor Arrays

This paper presents a multi-channel readout chip for high throughput single molecule sensing with solidstate nanopores. The readout IC achieves 1 MHz BW to capture the fast translocation signals coming from such nanopores. Since molecule translocation events are typically sparse in time, the ASIC features a novel analog event detection circuit to detect which pores have molecules passing through them and only records from those pores. A 16-channel prototype readout IC implemented in $0.18-\mu \mathrm{m}$ CMOS is demonstrated which can be connected to commercial nanopores. The recording frontend is only $0.024 \mathrm{~mm}^{2} /$ channel and consumes $376 \mu \mathrm{~W} /$ channel. Both electrical characterization and actual single-molecule sensing with commercial nanopores are demonstrated.