High PSRR Wide Supply Range Dual-Voltage Reference Circuit for Bio-Implantable Applications

On-chip systems are challenging owing to the limited size of the components, such as the capacitor bank in the rectifier. With a small on-chip capacitor, the output voltage of the rectifier might ring if the circuit experiences significant changes in current. The reference circuit is the first block after the rectifier, and the entire system relies on its robustness. A fully integrated dual-voltage reference circuit for bio-implantable applications is presented. The proposed circuit utilizes nonlinear current compensation techniques that significantly decrease supply variations and reject high-supply ripples for various frequencies. The reference circuit was verified using a 0.35 µm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process. Maximum PSRR values of −112 dB and −128 dB were obtained. With a supply range from 2.8 to 12 V, the proposed design achieves 0.916 and 1.5 mV/V line regulation for the positive and negative reference circuits, respectively.

Insights in the Ionic Conduction inside Nanoporous Metal-Organic Frameworks by Using an Appropriate Equivalent Circuit

The conduction of protons and other ions in nanoporous materials, such as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), is intensively explored with the aim of enhancing the performance of energy-related electrochemical systems. The ionic conductivity, as a key property of the material, is typically determined by using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) in connection with a suitable equivalent circuit. Often, equivalent circuits are used where the physical meaning of each component is debatable. Here, we present an equivalent circuit for the ionic conduction of electrolytes in nanoporous, nonconducting materials between inert and impermeable electrodes without faradaic electrode reactions. We show the equivalent circuit perfectly describes the impedance spectra measured for the ion conduction in MOFs in the form of powders pressed into pellets as well as for MOF thin films. This is demonstrated for the ionic conduction of an aprotic ionic liquid, and of various protic solvents in different MOF structures. Due to the clear physical meaning of each element of the equivalent circuit, further insights into the electrical double layer forming at the MOF-electrode interface can be obtained. As a result, EIS combined with the appropriate reference circuit allows us to make statements of the quality of the MOF-substrate interface of different MOF-film samples.

Cell-Free Characterization of Coherent Feed-Forward Loop-Based Synthetic Genetic Circuits

Regulatory pathways inside living cells employ feed-forward architectures to fulfill essential signal processing functions that aide in the interpretation of various types of inputs through noise-filtering, fold-change detection and adaptation. Although it has been demonstrated computationally that a coherent feed-forward loop (CFFL) can function as noise filter, a property essential to decoding complex temporal signals, this motif has not been extensively characterized experimentally or integrated into larger networks. Here we use post-transcriptional regulation to implement and characterize a synthetic CFFL in an Escherichia coli cell-free transcription-translation system and build larger composite feed-forward architectures. We employ microfluidic flow reactors to probe the response of the CFFL circuit using both persistent and short, noise-like inputs and analyze the influence of different circuit components on the steady-state and dynamics of the output. We demonstrate that our synthetic CFFL implementation can reliably repress background activity compared to a reference circuit, but displays low potential as a temporal filter, and validate these findings using a computational model. Our results offer practical insight into the putative noise-filtering behavior of CFFLs and show that this motif can be used to mitigate leakage and increase the fold-change of the output of synthetic genetic circuits.