Physical Electronics Dept.

***** Seminar *****

Guy Landman

An M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Yossi Rosenwaks

School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel

Wednesday, 13 March 2013 at 10:00, Room 032, labs Building.

Fabrication and simulation of Electrostatically Formed nanowire suited for gas sensing

In recent years, research and development of silicon-nanowire based sensors has received a great deal of attention since their extensive application potential is highly recognized in areas such as medical diagnostic and electronic nose. These nanowire-based sensors are known to present an enhanced sensitivity in comparison with planar devices (such as ImmunoFETs). However, these devices suffer from relatively low SNR, low gain, surface states, non-uniform doping and require fabrication techniques that are not suited for mass production.

Recently, a new type of NW called electrostatically-formed-nanowire (EFN) was demonstrated and found to be sensitive to biological analytes at femto-Molar concentrations. In this case the nanowire is not physically fabricated but rather electrostatically formed.

In this seminar we will present the electrostatically-formed-nanowire (EFN) sensor suited for gas sensing. We will present the considerations that were required to develop the process flow at Tower-Jazz foundry that has resulted with 4 prototypes. We will present simulation results done with Sentaurus simulator which enabled us to determine the process flow parameters (such as energy and dose of the different implants and choosing and developing recipes for thermal processes etc). Using this simulator we examined the formation, shape, size and position of the electrostatically confined nanowire under different biasing regimes.

We will present simulated sensing experiments which exhibit the lateral-scanning-of-the-surface-for-signal-enhancement possibility and that using the well-established semiconductor industry methods an EFN device sensitive to a single-elementary-charge can be realized.