Delphi

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The Delphi Program vision is to empower all Americans to fully understand their own bodies with continuous monitoring of deep biological information—hormones, cytokines, and drug levels. Leveraging chiplets, a new system architecture in microelectronics, will greatly decrease cost, reduce size, weight, and power (SWaP), and enable all developers to access cutting edge capabilities. By the end, Delphi will quickly and cheaply develop modular wearable or ingestible sensors for monitoring a broad range of biological markers. The benefits include 1) early detection to prevent disease progression, 2) continuous monitoring for safe home recovery, and 3) precision, closed-loop monitoring of therapies for superior outcomes.

Delphi will improve the biosensor development ecosystem, enabling low-cost but high performance sensing by shifting to a chiplet-based architecture. With chiplets, components of what would typically be an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) can be reused and remixed into new devices that share the same high performance. Yields and scaling tend to be easier, and the approach inherently enables heterogeneous integration, which is ideal due to the diverse material set often needed for biosensing. Delphi aims to leverage existing advances in chiplets to focus on the components specific to biosensing. First, dry, hermetically sealed chiplets must provide ultra-low power management, overcoming the limitations of current power-hungry standards and the constraints of low duty cycle operation and RF or internal power harvesting. Additionally, chiplets that ensure secure communication of medical data from these body-worn devices must be developed. Second, “wet” biosensor chiplets that directly interface with biology are needed. Delphi aims to extend the state of art from biophysical measurements or high-concentration metabolites to the continuous measurement of low concentration biochemical markers such as hormones and cytokines over extended periods. Third, these chiplets must be integrated into biocompatible packages that are fully encapsulated except at the sensing interface. Existing encapsulation methods either lack the selectivity and reliability required at the chiplet scale or depend on rigid, complex, non-modular solutions. New packaging strategies must protect delicate electronics, preserve sensor surface chemistry, and support durable, long-term operation in biological environments.