FROM NEURAL CHIP AND ENGINEERED BIOMOLECULES TO BIOELECTRONIC DEVICES- AN OVERVIEW

At the first C.E.C. Workshop, in Brussels on 28-29 November 1991, atte nded by over 70 leading European scientists and industrialists, bioele ctronics was defined as 'the use of biological materials and biologica l architectures for information processing systems and new devices'. A t the end of the Frankfurt Workshop, bioelectronics, specifically bio- molecular electronics, was described as 'the research and development of bio-inspired (i.e. self-assembly) inorganic and organic materials a nd of bio-inspired (i.e. massive parallelism) hardware architectures f or the implementation of new information processing systems, sensors a nd actuators, and for molecular manufacturing down to the atomic scale '. The subject of this overview is to summarize some of the most signi ficant progress in bio-molecular electronics from neural VLSI networks and bio-molecular engineering. As an example of one possible route, e mphasis is placed on the results recently obtained within this laborat ory.