Design of a portable mini potentiostat for electrochemical biosensors

In this paper, a portable mini potentiostat is proposed for the signal processing of electrochemical biosensors. The proposed potentiostat consists of two circuit blocks: one is the digital circuit and the other is the analog circuit. The digital circuit includes a microprocessor which is used to control the operation of the potentiostat and to generate the programmable waveform for a biosensor's analysis. The analog circuit is used to realize the function of the potentiostat and to measure the biosensor's current. The proposed potentiostat can perform general electrochemical analysis functions, such as cyclic voltammetry and amperometry, and its total area is 4.5*5 cm2. After the electrochemical analysis is completed, we design a data analysis interface to provide the biosensor's designer a tool to catch the response of the biosensor from analysis data. In the experiment, we adopt a nitrate biosensor to verify the performance of the proposed potentiostat. The experimental results show that the proposed potentiostat has the merits of small size, good accuracy, low cost, low power consumption, and high portability.