High Accuracy Open-Type Current Sensor with a Differential Planar Hall Resistive Sensor.

In this paper, we propose a high accuracy open-type current sensor with a differential Planar Hall Resistive (PHR) sensor. Conventional open-type current sensors with magnetic sensors are usually vulnerable to interference from an external magnetic field. To reduce the effect of an unintended magnetic field, the proposed design uses a differential structure with PHR. The differential structure provides robust performance to unwanted magnetic flux and increased magnetic sensitivity. In addition, instead of conventional Hall sensors with a magnetic concentrator, a newly developed PHR with high sensitivity is employed to sense horizontal magnetic fields. The PHR sensor and read-out integrated circuit (IC) are integrated through a post-Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process using multi-chip packaging. The current sensor is designed to measure a 1 A current level. The measured performance of the designed current sensor has a 16 kHz bandwidth and a current nonlinearity of under ±0.5%.

Synthesis of licochalcone analogues with increased anti-inflammatory activity.

Licohalcones have been reported to have various biological activities. However, most of licochalcones also showed cytotoxicity even though their versitile utilities. Licochalcones B and D, which have common substituents at aromatic ring B, are targeted to modify the structure at aromatic ring A for inflammatory studies. Licochalcone derivatives (1-6) thus prepared are compared for their suppression ability of nitric oxide (NO) production and showed 9.94, 4.72, 10.1, 4.85, 2.37 and 4.95µM of IC50 values, respectively.

On-chip magnetometer for characterization of superparamagnetic nanoparticles.

An on-chip magnetometer was fabricated by integrating a planar Hall magnetoresistive (PHR) sensor with microfluidic channels. The measured in-plane field sensitivities of an integrated PHR sensor with NiFe/Cu/IrMn trilayer structure were extremely high at 8.5 µV Oe(-1). The PHR signals were monitored during the oscillation of 35 pL droplets of magnetic nanoparticles, and reversed profiles for the positive and negative z-fields were measured, where magnitudes increased with the applied z-field strength. The measured PHR signals for 35 pL droplets of magnetic nanoparticles versus applied z-fields showed excellent agreement with magnetization curves measured by a vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) of 3 µL volume, where a PHR voltage of 1 µV change is equivalent to 0.309 emu cc(-1) of the volume magnetization with a magnetic moment resolution of ~10(-10) emu.

Preparation, characterization and application of polyaniline nanospheres to biosensing.

Polyaniline nanospheres (PANI-NS) prepared by morphological transformation of micelle polymerized camphorsulfonic acid (CSA) doped polyaniline nanotubes (PANI-NT) in the presence of ethylene glycol (EG) have been characterized by X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infra-red and UV-Visible spectroscopy. A PANI-NS (60-80 nm) film deposited onto an indium-tin-oxide (ITO) coated glass plate by the solution casting method has been utilized for covalent immobilization of biomolecules (cholesterol oxidase (ChOx)) viaN-ethyl-N'-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide (EDC) and N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS) chemistry for fabrication of a cholesterol biosensor. The ChOx/PANI-NS/ITO bioelectrode detects cholesterol in the concentration range of 25 to 500 mg dL(-1) with sensitivity of 1.3 x 10(-3) mA mg(-1) dL and regression coefficient of 0.98. Further, this PANI-NS based bioelectrode shows fast response time (10 s), low Michaelis-Menten constant (2.5 mM) and shelf-life of 12 weeks. The spherical nanostructure observed in the final morphology of the PANI-NS film is attributed to hydrogen bonding interactions between PANI-NT and EG.