Design Of Patch Clamp Amplifier System Based On Qt/E

Patch clamping technique which brings us great innovation on physiology research at cell or molecules level is an advanced research method in the field of electrophysiology, and plays a very important role in modern biophysics' research field. The fast performance improvement of embedded processor combined with the high-speed development of embedded Linux operation system relieves the people of constraints and limit exerted by traditional PC and Windows operation system, and designs out a novel more compact, high professional, low power consuming, high reliable and more cheaper embedded operation system. With the help of the development of these techniques, the patch clamping experiment platform based on PC system can be upgraded into our embedded patch clamping system.In this paper, a detailed description on the design of embedded patch clamping system was given through fully discussion on Linux operation system's kernel and file system as well as on Qt/E and other techniques. We introduced the processor's hardware circuit in the patch clamping system, related knowledge of Linux operation system's kernel, the design plan of file system chosen by Linux operation system and a kind of patch clamping application software based on Qt/E technique and designed by QT/C++ hybrid language. For processor, we chose a processor of high performance and high speed that was developed by ARM9 chip-company. For file system, we chose a mixed style combined YAFFS2 and Ramfs, and according to each function needed by the patch clamping system, we transplanted the corresponding part in Linux operation system to the experiment platform to substitute the traditional PC and Windows operation system. Besides, by using a series of tools of QT, we developed the platform interface which was beautiful and very friendly to user. Moreover, we showed the procedure of using POSIX threads programming to achieve the experimental module design of patch clamping system. In brief, this whole paper clearly explained how the stable, reliable, and fast cell model experiment provable embedded patch clamping system was designed due to benefit of software optimization on each component of the system in a limited embedded processor resource scenario.