A low-power digital IC emulating intracellular calcium dynamics

Abstract

Low power/area cytomorphic chips may be interfaced and ultimately implanted in the human body for cell‐sensing and cell‐control applications of the future. In such electronic platforms, it is crucial to accurately mimic the biological timescales and operate in real time. This paper proposes a methodology where slow nonlinear dynamical systems describing the behaviour of naturally encountered biological systems can be efficiently realised in hardware. To this end, as a case study, a low power and efficient digital Application‐Specific Integrated Circuit capable of emulating slow intracellular calcium dynamics with timescales reaching to seconds has been fabricated in the commercially available AMS 0.35 μm technology and compared with its analog counterpart. The fabricated chip occupies an area of 1.5 mm2 (excluding the area of the pads) and consumes 18.93 nW for each calcium unit from a power supply of 3.3 V. The presented cytomimetic topology follows closely the behaviour of its biological counterpart, exhibiting similar time‐domain calcium ions dynamics. Results show that the implemented design has the potential to speed up large–scale simulations of slow intracellular dynamics by sharing cellular units in real time.