The development of new powerful applications and the improvement in fabrication techniques are promising an explosive growth in lab-on-chip use in the upcoming future. As the demand reaches significant levels, the semiconductor industry may enter in the field, bringing its capability to produce complex devices in large volumes, high quality and low cost. The lab-on-chip concept, when applied to medicine, leads to the point-of-care concept, where simple, compact and cheap instruments allow diagnostic assays to be performed quickly by untrained personnel directly on patient side. In this paper, some practical and economical considerations will be made to support the advantages of Real-time PCR testing in point-of-care. Later, a Real-time PCR platform developed by STMicroelectronics on lab-on-chip will be introduced, potentially capable enter in the common medical practice in the near future. Some examples of possible applications and their advantage over the traditional practice will be presented.
Marco Bianchessi received the degree in Electronic engineering at “Politecnico di Milano” in 1993. He joined STMicroelectronics where, from 1994 to 1998, has been the system engineer in the team that introduced the first family of digital audio devices in STM, developing A/D D/A converters, dedicated DSP and digital audio interfaces. In 1998 he took the responsibility of the development of the Bluetooth system and since then he became the official representative of STM in the Bluetooth SIG. Among other task he actively contributed to the definition of the Bluetooth 2.0 standard. Since 2004, his activities broaden, covering also application of MEMS sensors and Biomedical applications. He is currently leader of an R&D team, located in Milan and Lecce, with competences in system architectures, SW development, HW design, Optics and microfluidic. His main target is the development of innovative platforms, based on biochemical MEMS, to implement tests of DNA and other biological molecules. He is co-authors of several papers published on scientific journals and owner of more than ten patents in the fields of signal processing and microelectronics.