CMOS-compatible fabrication of top-gated field-effect transistor silicon nanowire-based biosensors

Field-effect transistor (FET) nanowire-based biosensors are very promising tools for medical diagnosis. In this paper, we introduce a simple method to fabricate FET silicon nanowires using only standard microelectromechanical system (MEMS) processes. The key steps of our fabrication process were a local oxidation of silicon (LOCOS) and anisotropic KOH etchings that enabled us to reduce the width of the initial silicon structures from 10 mu m to 170 nm. To turn the nanowires into a FET, a top-gate electrode was patterned in gold next to them in order to apply the gate voltage directly through the investigated liquid environment. An electrical characterization demonstrated the p-type behaviour of the nanowires. Preliminary chemical sensing tested the sensitivity to pH of our device. The effect of the binding of streptavidin on biotinylated nanowires was monitored in order to evaluate their biosensing ability. In this way, streptavidin was detected down to a 100 ng mL(-1) concentration in phosphate buffered saline by applying a gate voltage less than 1.2 V. The use of a top-gate electrode enabled the detection of biological species with only very low voltages that were compatible with future handheld-requiring applications. We thus demonstrated the potential of our devices and their fabrication as a solution for the mass production of efficient and reliable FET nanowire-based biological sensors.