Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is one of the most successful techniques of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and is mostly in use for the treatment of infertility with male factors. In this method, before injecting sperm into the intracytoplasmic of the oocyte, cumulus cells around the oocyte must be stripped to facilitate the injection process. To achieve this, both enzymatic and mechanical methods are used in embryological laboratories for denudation, which has major deficiencies, including the possibility of damaging the oocyte prior to the injection process. In this research, a microfluidic-based device is introduced for the separation of cumulus cells around the oocyte with minimum manual operations. The results prove high efficiency, and non-destructive denudation of the oocyte with the reduced amount of culture medium leads to the low-cost preparation process of oocytes. The process can also be integrated with ICSI CHIPs under development and will be reported shortly.

This article reports on the design of a 8-channel neural recording amplifier and stimulation back-end in TSMC 0. 18μ m technology which can do the recording and stimulating simultaneously. The design of proposed neural amplifier is based on indirect negative feedback and provides tunable lower cutoff frequency, and digitally-programmable upper cutoff frequency and voltage gain. Moreover, the proposed circuit employs attenuators in the same feedback loop in order to further reduce the silicon area consumed by the capacitors and at the same time to increase the input impedance of the circuit. The 8-channel designed circuit consumes 0. 27mm2 of CHIP area and operated with a supply voltage of 1. 8V, power consumption of each channel is 27μ W with the THD of-50dB@1kHz and output voltage swing of 0. 95Vpp. The designed stimulation bak-end circuit, in addition to traditional rectangular pulse shapes, can generates biphasic stimulation pulses with exponential shapes, whose time constants are digitally programmable. A class-B second generation current conveyor is designed to be used for delivering stimulation current pulses of up to ± 96μ A to the target tissue and a charge pump block is in charge of the generating supply voltages of ± 3. 3V. The circuit consumes 0. 043mm2 of silicon area for each channel (excluding charge pumps). Simulation results indicate that the stimuli generator meets expected requirements with the maximum power consumption of 1. 2mW when connected to electrode-tissue impedance of as high as 25kΩ .

It is undeniable that scheduling plays an important role in increasing the network quality on CHIP. If experts realize the significant of mapping and scheduling in getting rid of delays and increasing performance of these systems, they will ponder over these activities much more scrupulously. The operation scheduling problem in network on CHIP (NoC) is NP-hard; therefore, effective heuristic methods are needed to provide modal solutions. In this paper, ant colony scheduling was introduced as a simple and effective method to increase allocator matching efficiency and hence network performance, particularly suited to networks with complex topology and asymmetric traffic patterns. The proposed algorithm was studied in torus and flattened-butterfly topologies with multiple types of traffic pattern. For evaluating the performance of the proposed algorithm, specialized simulator network on CHIP entitled by BookSim working under Linux operation system was used. Evaluation results showed that this algorithm, in many causes, had positive effects on reducing network delays and increasing CHIP performance compared with other algorithms. For instance, for a complex topologies, this algorithm under maximum injection_rate of up to (10%) increasing throughput have been observed, injection rate, on average, compared to other existing algorithms.