As COVID-19 protection becomes normal, nucleic acid testing is required when people travel across cities, provinces or abroad. In order to improve work efficiency and save waiting time, rapid COVID-19 detector came into being. Compared with the traditional COVID-19 detector, the rapid COVID-19 detector has higher requirements for the accuracy of temperature detection in the working process. Therefore, its internal TEC module needs to adopt high-precision NTC thermistor chip produced by EXSENSE Electronics Technology Co., LTD., in order to monitor and control the temperature better.

TEC module plays an indispensable role in rapid COVID-19 detector. TEC module is small in size and light in weight, which is very sensitive to temperature (rapid cooling and rapid heating), it can meet the requirements of heating and cooling without additional heating module. Because of its solid base structure, which has high reliability, do not have to worry about refrigerant leakage, corrosive liquid leakage, and it is easy maintenance.

At a higher level, biological samples may not have enough target DNA to be detected by optical fluorescence method. Therefore, DNA amplification (cloning/replication) is required before analysis. Currently, two major amplification techniques are polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), both of which require the use of heating and cooling elements. Assisted by the NTC thermistor chip, TEC module carry out thermal cycling through three independent temperature conditions changes in PCR amplification technology, including heating the sample to 95℃, cooling it to 50-56 ℃, and keeping it at a constant temperature of 72℃. Repeating this cycle can produce billions of copies of DNA. In the process of LAMP amplification, the thermistor chip assisted TEC module kept the sample at a constant temperature of 60-65 ℃ to avoid the reaction sped up by thermal cycle.

The proper operation of TEC module requires a high level of temperature accuracy to monitor the heating and cooling required for nucleic acid amplification, therefore the addition of NTC thermistor chips is particularly important. By using the characteristics of temperature monitoring of thermistor chip, the normal operation of TEC module can be better maintained in the working process.

NTC thermistor chip produced by EXSENSE Electronics Technology Co., Ltd. has the characteristics of high precision (which can up to ±0.5%, ±1%, ±2%, ±3%), small size and high sensitivity, etc., which can effectively prevent it from affecting the measurement results due to over-temperature in the rapid COVID-19 detector.