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 paper proposes a 2.4 GHz active mixer without passive inductor for the transceiver System. Taking into account the design requirements of the mixer, a double-balanced down-conversion structure with active inductor and negative resistance is designed. The proposed mixer with 130 nm CMOS technology is designed and simulated using Cadence software at 1.5 V supply voltage. Although we had to compromise conversion gain with linearity, we were able to achieve very high conversion gain with average linearity. Based on the results of post-layout simulations, the conversion gain of 27.57 dB, IIP3 equal to -7.88 dBm, 1-dB compression point equal to -17.34 dBm and IIP2 equal to 44.22 dBm with power consumption of 2.5 mW was obtained for the proposed mixer. The chip size without input and output pads is 95.18 µm × 117.68 µm, which leads to a chip area of 0.0112mm2.