Multi-Wire Tri-Gate Silicon Nanowires Reaching Milli-pH Unit Resolution in One Micron Square Footprint
1
Institute of Bioengineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
2
DIEGM, Università degli Studi di Udine, 33100 Udine, Italy
3
Laboratoire d’Électronique et de Technologie de l’Information (LETI), Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives (CEA), 38054 Grenoble Cedex 9, France
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editors: Mark A. Reed and Mathias Wipf
Biosensors 2016, 6(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/bios6010009
Received: 24 November 2015 / Revised: 26 February 2016 / Accepted: 4 March 2016 / Published: 15 March 2016
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Field-Effect Transistor Biosensors)
The signal-to-noise ratio of planar ISFET pH sensors deteriorates when reducing the area occupied by the device, thus hampering the scalability of on-chip analytical systems which detect the DNA polymerase through pH measurements. Top-down nano-sized tri-gate transistors, such as silicon nanowires, are designed for high performance solid-state circuits thanks to their superior properties of voltage-to-current transduction, which can be advantageously exploited for pH sensing. A systematic study is carried out on rectangular-shaped nanowires developed in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible technology, showing that reducing the width of the devices below a few hundreds of nanometers leads to higher charge sensitivity. Moreover, devices composed of several wires in parallel further increase the exposed surface per unit footprint area, thus maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio. This technology allows a sub milli-pH unit resolution with a sensor footprint of about 1 µm2, exceeding the performance of previously reported studies on silicon nanowires by two orders of magnitude.
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Keywords:
silicon nanowires; tri-gate transistors; ISFET; pH sensors; 1/f noise
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MDPI and ACS Style
Accastelli, E.; Scarbolo, P.; Ernst, T.; Palestri, P.; Selmi, L.; Guiducci, C. Multi-Wire Tri-Gate Silicon Nanowires Reaching Milli-pH Unit Resolution in One Micron Square Footprint. Biosensors 2016, 6, 9.
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