Constantine Sideris

Biomedical device technology has been rapidly advancing over the past decade and is
poised to revolutionize healthcare as we see it today. CMOS integrated circuits have been a
major enabling factor towards the success of modern biomedical devices due to supporting
high levels of integration, capability for high sensitivity detection, and being mass producible at
a low price point. In this talk, I will show how manipulation and sensing of magnetic fields using
CMOS technology can be used to enable Point-of-Care biomolecular sensors as well as position
tracking of implantable and ingestible devices. I will begin by presenting a Point-of-Care
magnetic biosensor array designed in 65nm CMOS capable of performing wash-free
immunodetection as well as single-site multiplexed detection of biomolecular targets. The
sensor consists of a 2x2 magnetic spectrometer array which leverages a concurrent dual-
frequency transformer-based oscillator. Concurrent dual-frequency operation allows
compensation of the drift of the free-running sensing oscillator, achieving a sensitivity of
0.7ppm (50x improvement over the free-running case) and consuming only 3.1mW per cell over
a wide frequency range of 1.2-1.65 / 2.9-4 GHz. A biotin-streptavidin immunoassay using iron
oxide magnetic nanoparticle labels is performed without any washing steps, demonstrating
high sensitivity and viability for point-of-care diagnostics. Finally, I will conclude the talk by
presenting a new magnetic localization scheme based on frequency-division multiplexing for
capsule endoscopy applications. The approach significantly reduces the reference excitation coil
sizes and decreases the required excitation current by three orders of magnitude compared to
prior work, making it practical for wearable systems. A fully integrated wireless receiver
prototype is implemented in 180nm CMOS and packaged in an ingestible pill form factor. To the
best of our knowledge, the new scheme achieves the best experimentally demonstrated
tracking accuracy in both 2D and 3D localization experiments, achieving a sub-mm mean
absolute position error and consuming only 336μW while running at 100% duty cycle.

Biography:

Constantine Sideris is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the
University of Southern California. He received the B.S., M.S., and PhD degrees with honors from
the California Institute of Technology in 2010, 2011, and 2017 respectively. He was a visiting
scholar at UC Berkeley’s Wireless Research Center from 2013 to 2014. He was a postdoctoral
scholar in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech from 2017 to
2018 working on integral equation methods for electromagnetics. Constantine’s research
interests include analog/RF and photonic integrated circuits and computational
electromagnetics for biomedical and biosensing applications and wireless communications. He
was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2021, an AFOSR YIP award in 2020, an AFOSR
DURIP award in 2021, the Caltech Leadership Award in 2017, and the NSF graduate research
fellowship in 2010. His research is highly interdisciplinary and bridges the fields of
bioengineering, medicine, applied mathematics and computation with electrical engineering
and physics. His current interests in biomedical devices include portable Point-of-Care in-vitro
biosensors, wearable devices for real-time monitoring and analysis of biological signals,
ingestible “smart” pills, and implantable devices.

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