Anitoa Demos DNA Sensing with its Low-Light Fluorescent Imager

PRWeb: Anitoa Systems, a Palo Alto startup established in 2011, partnering with Zhejiang University of China, has demonstrated a handheld real time quantitative-polymerase-chain-reaction system (qPCR) using Anitoa's ultra-low-light CMOS bio-optical sensor. Anitoa’s ULS24 ultra-low light CMOS bio-optical sensor is said to be the first commercially available CMOS sensor that has the needed sensitivity to replace photon multiplier tubes and cooled-CCDs in a wide range of medical and scientific instruments. The ultra-low light sensitivity (3e-6 lux) of Anitoa’s CMOS sensor is crucial for achieving good SNR in imaging molecular interactions based on fluorescent or chemiluminescence signaling principle. “We are very pleased to see the test results coming back from partner hospital showing the effectiveness of detecting infectious pathogens. This not only validates the CMOS bio-optical sensor’s ultra-low-light sensitivity, but also its applicability to real world disease diagnostics”, said Anitoa CEO Zhimin Ding.

ULS24 is built on 0.18um CMOS process at "a world-leader specialty semiconductor foundry."

Anitoa’s Intelligent Dark-current Management architecture. It starts with high responsivity photodiodes.
The readout circuit performs multimodal sensing to capture signal and noise information, the A/D and digital signal processor is said to take advantage of the multi-modal information to achieve better noise cancellation.