Emerging complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies and their ongoing downscaling trend have opened an avenue to developing integrated systems for life sciences. They offer great advantages for the monolithic integration of several active elements, and the implementation of millions of biosensors along with their transducers and readout circuits on a single chip. Benefits include the ability to make highly dense systems with high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), good accessibility and reliability. Moreover, the huge investment in CMOS foundries and the possibility of the batch production of various devices using CMOS have established it as an economical technology appropriate for the fabrication of affordable platforms for end-users. All these features make CMOS electronics a valuable technology for the implementation of integrated bio-systems such as lab-on-chips (LoCs) and point-of-care (PoC) devices.

CMOS-based sensors offer significant advantages to life science applications, such as non-invasive long-term recordings, fast responses and label-free processes. They have been widely applied in many biological and medical fields for the study of living cell samples such as neural cell recording and stimulation, monitoring metabolic activity, cell manipulation, and extracellular pH monitoring. Compared to other sensing techniques, capacitive sensors are low-complexity, high-precision, label-free sensing methods for monitoring cellular activities such as cell viability, proliferation and morphology.