A Control-Referenced Tri-Channel OECT Receiver for Hybrid Molecular Communication Toward Brain Organoid Interfaces
arXiv:2604.10798
Abstract
Brain organoid interfaces that seek neuromodulator readout benefit from chemical receivers with molecular specificity and tolerance to drift. This paper presents a receiver-centric theoretical study of a control-referenced tri-channel organic electrochemical transistor (OECT) receiver with dopamine- and serotonin-selective pixels alongside a hydrogel-matched control pixel. The Ag/AgCl electrode provides the electrochemical gate reference, whereas the control pixel is used only as a matched reference for common-mode drift and other low-frequency baseline fluctuations during amplitude decisions. We couple finite-duration release, restricted diffusion with clearance, aptamer binding, OECT transduction, and correlated thermal, flicker, and drift noise, and we evaluate MoSK, CSK-4, and a 2-bit Hybrid detector on the same front-end by Monte Carlo simulation. At micrometers, control referencing mainly benefits the Hybrid amplitude branch, reducing Hybrid SER from to at molecules/symbol while barely changing the MoSK component. In calibrated no-ISI front-end benchmarks, Hybrid+CTRL reaches an LoD of 11866 molecules/symbol at 45 micrometers and remains below CSK-4+CTRL over much of the medium-to-long-distance range studied. The reported SER and LoD values are scenario-based receiver forecasts, whereas the more transferable result is the regime-dependent rule for when matched control referencing benefits Hybrid amplitude decoding.
16 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications (TMBMC)