Integrated Circuit Technology for Next Generation Point-of-Care Spectroscopy Applications

Point-of-care personalized medicine and home diagnostics are emerging topics that can help to master the challenges of aging societies. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy is one of the most promising sensing principles because it enables the detection of proteins, metabolites, and reactive oxygen species, which play crucial roles in a large number of diseases, with high specificity. To provide a self-contained introduction to the topic, this article starts with a description of the basic working principle of magnetic resonance spectroscopy, highlighting the similarities and differences compared to conventional impedance spectroscopy methods. Focusing on the two specific techniques of NMR and ESR spectroscopy, we explain how miniaturized systems co-integrating detectors and the signal processing electronics on a single chip are a key enabler for portable, low-cost spectrometry systems. These systems bear many similarities to conventional communication transceivers and can therefore largely benefit from recent advances in communication circuits as well as entirely new detection principles such as VCO-based detection, which are enabled by the use of modern nanometer-scaled integrated circuit technologies. An overview of the current state of the art of such miniaturized magnetic resonance spectrometers is presented, which both highlights the excellent new possibilities associated with these systems and at the same time outlines the current challenges and future research directions in this emerging field of research.