Efficient Pattern Detection for Embedded Optical Bio-sensing System

To enable pattern detection in optical signals from a novel optical biosensor used in medical embedded system, we propose a set of efficient algorithms and their corresponding implementation on FPGA (field programmable gate array). The optical biosensor is a porous silicon micro cavity membrane, which can generate different optical reflectance spectra for varieties of molecule solutions. In measured reflectance spectra of the membrane, our design is able to detect the shift of the resonant dip which is considered as the pattern to distinguish target molecule solution of different concentration. According to measured results, besides the much higher sensitivity of the novel optical sensor than classic electrochemical methods, our FPGA based implementation of our detection algorithms also shows significant speedup over software implementation on PC. The small chip area cost of FPGA implementation of our detection algorithms further ensures feasibility of ASIC (application specific integrated circuits) to incorporate both sensors and signal processing in near future.