| Detection and recognition of chemical ions and biological molecules are important in basic science as well as in pharmacology and medicine. Nanotechnology has made it possible to greatly enhance detection sensitivity through the use of nanowires, nanotubes, nanocrystals, nanocantilevers, and quantum dots as sensing platforms. In this work silicon nanowires are used as the conductance channel between the source and drain of a FET (field effect transistor) device and the biomolecular binding on the surface of nanowire modifies the conductance like a change in gate voltage. Due to the high surface-to-volume ratio and unique character of the silicon nanowires, this device has significant advantages in real-time, label-free and highly sensitive detection of a wide range of species, including proteins, nucleic acids and other small molecules. Here we present a biosensor fabricated from CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) compatible top-down methods including electron beam lithography. This method enables scalable manufacturing of multiple sensor arrays with high efficiency. In a systematic study of the device characteristics with different wire widths, we have found the sensitivity of the device increases when wire width decreases. By operating the device in appropriate bias region, the sensitivity of the device can be improved without doping or high temperature annealing. Not only can this device be used to detect the concentration of proteins and metabolites like urea or glucose, but also dynamic information like the dissociation constant can be extracted from the measurement. The device is also used to detect the clinically related cancer antigen CA 15.3 and shows potential application in cancer studies. |
