Sensors for chemical detection based on top-down fabricated polycrystalline silicon nanowires

Abstract

Semiconducting Silicon (Si) nanowires (NWs) have been widely investigated for their potential to function as highly sensitive and selective sensors for both chemical and biological purposes. A key point of this sensing method is to be real-time and label-free. Several interesting sensing assays have been demonstrated such as sensing of ions, proteins, DNA and viruses[1-3]. The available approaches of silicon nanowire fabrication usually use some advanced lithographic techniques i.e., deep-UV, electron-beam or nanoimprint lithography to pattern silicon nanowires on SOI wafers. Recently, spacer nanowires patterned by a conventional anisotropic dry etch were used to form transistors. While this approach has the advantage of CMOS-compatibility, these techniques are extremely expensive and accessible only to large-scale integrated circuit manufacturers. While this approach delivers a cheap route for nanowire definition, nanowire volume control across the wafer remains challenging as the nanowire sidewall region generally receives unwanted etching