Wafer-scale graphene field-effect transistor biosensor arrays with monolithic CMOS readout

Abstract

The reliability of analysis is becoming increasingly important as point-of-care diagnostics are transitioning from single analyte detection towards multiplexed multianalyte detection. Multianalyte detection benefits greatly from complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) integrated sensing solutions, offering miniaturized multiplexed sensing arrays with integrated readout electronics and extremely large sensor counts. The development of CMOS back end of line integration compatible graphene field-effect transistor (GFET) based biosensing has been rapid during the last few years, both in terms of the fabrication scale-up and functionalization towards biorecognition from real sample matrices. The next steps in industrialization relate to improving reliability and require increased statistics. Regarding functionalization towards truly quantitative sensors and on-chip bioassays with improved statistics require sensor arrays with reduced variability in functionalization. Such multiplexed bioassays, whether based on graphene or on other sensitive nanomaterials, are among the most promising technologies for label-free electrical biosensing. As an important step towards that, we report wafer-scale fabrication of CMOS integrated GFET arrays with high yield and uniformity, designed especially for biosensing applications. We demonstrate the operation of the sensing platform array with 512 GFETs in simultaneous detection for sodium chloride concentration series. This platform offers a truly statistical approach on GFET based biosensing and further to quantitative and multi-analyte sensing. The reported techniques can also be applied to other fields relying on functionalized GFETs, such as gas or chemical sensing or infrared imaging