Multiphysics Simulation of Biosensors Involving 3D Biological Reaction–Diffusion Phenomena in a Standard Circuit EDA Environment

The topic of this paper is the development of biological models for 3D reaction–diffusion phenomena that can be used in any circuit electronic design automation environment for the simulation of biosensors. Biological systems that involve such 3D phenomena are described by partial differential equations. Our approach consists in discretizing these equations according to the finite-difference method and converting the resulting ordinary differential equations into an assembly of elementary electronic equivalent circuits that are directly simulated with SPICE. The main interest of this approach is the ability to couple such models with third-party SPICE models of electronic circuits, sensors, and transducers, i.e., models from any physical domain ruled by Kirchhoff laws, allowing modeling and simulation of any multi-physics systems in a conventional circuit design environment, here CADENCE. The tool is validated on simple problems for which analytical solutions are known. Then, the interest of the approach is illustrated on the study of a biosensor.