The smart docking surface to control MICREAgents and other chemical systems, developed in year one, was distributed to partners and underwent a further interface development to allow full electrochemical control of scanning voltages and currents. The dock and interface were enclosed in a custom tight Faraday cage construct to reduce measurement noise. Elecrtrochemiluminescence on single micro electrodes demonstrated the response time and flexibility of the docking system (see Fig. 1).
A further highlight of year two was the completion of the design of a second generation dock. This highly integrated sensor-actuator docking chip with 216=128x128x4 micro electrodes, is arranged in a regular array of 2x2 sensor-actuator modules. The incorporation of sensor arrays with pseudo-reference electrodes, that for example can be configured as local pH-sensors or local ionic strength detectors, allows the dock to detect chemical events such as docking or reaction completion. The fine grained actuation array can be used to control lablet docking in arbitrary registrations. The docking chips, currently being fabricated, have been electronically simulated, are integrated with lablet fabrication in a single whole wafer run (Europractice/IMEC/TSMC): see Fig. 2 for one of the reticules.