Ionic effects on the transport characteristics of nanowire-based FETs in a liquid environment
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For the development of ultra-sensitive electrical bio/chemical sensors based on nanowire field effect transistors (FETs), the influence of the ions in the solution on the electron transport has to be understood. For this purpose we establish a simulation platform for nanowire FETs in the liquid environment by implementing the modified Poisson–Boltzmann model into Landauer transport theory. We investigate the changes of the electric potential and the transport characteristics due to the ions. The reduction of sensitivity of the sensors due to the screening effect from the electrolyte could be successfully reproduced. We also fabricated silicon nanowire Schottky-barrier FETs and our model could capture the observed reduction of the current with increasing ionic concentration. This shows that our simulation platform can be used to interpret ongoing experiments, to design nanowire FETs, and it also gives insight into controversial issues such as whether ions in the buffer solution affect the transport characteristics or not.
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Ionic effects on the transport characteristics of nanowire-based FETs in a liquid environment
),
Abstract
For the development of ultra-sensitive electrical bio/chemical sensors based on nanowire field effect transistors (FETs), the influence of the ions in the solution on the electron transport has to be understood. For this purpose we establish a simulation platform for nanowire FETs in the liquid environment by implementing the modified Poisson–Boltzmann model into Landauer transport theory. We investigate the changes of the electric potential and the transport characteristics due to the ions. The reduction of sensitivity of the sensors due to the screening effect from the electrolyte could be successfully reproduced. We also fabricated silicon nanowire Schottky-barrier FETs and our model could capture the observed reduction of the current with increasing ionic concentration. This shows that our simulation platform can be used to interpret ongoing experiments, to design nanowire FETs, and it also gives insight into controversial issues such as whether ions in the buffer solution affect the transport characteristics or not.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Kannan Balasubramanian for inspiring discussions. We acknowledge financial support from the Free State of Saxony (Sähsische Aufbaubank) in the young researcher group "InnovaSens" (SAB-No. 080942409). We also acknowledge the support by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Cluster of Excellence "Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden" (cfAED), the European Union (European Social Fund), the European project Synaptic Molecular Networks for Bio-inspired Information Processing (SYMONE) under contract No. 318597, and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology through the National Research Foundation of Korea (No. R31-10100). We also acknowledge the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at the Dresden University of Technology for computational resources.
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