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research article

Optimized electrochemical breakdown etching using temporal voltage variation for formation of nanopores in a silicon membrane

Chung, Nguyen Xuan
•
Gatty, Hithesh Kumar
•
Lu, Xi
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March 15, 2021
Sensors And Actuators B-Chemical

Dielectric breakdown etching is a well-known method of making nanopores on thin (similar to 50 nm) dielectric membranes. However, voltage driven translocation of biomolecules through such nanopores becomes extremely fast. For improved detection, for instance by the current blockage, a high-aspect-ratio nanopore could be beneficial for slowing down the translocation. High-aspect-ratio nanopore on silicon fabrication requires a well-controlled process and is dependent on specific crystal orientation, dopant type and resistivity of substrate. Therefore, an optimized method of processing high-aspect-ratio nanopores is necessary considering the advantage of a silicon membrane being able to be integrated with standard CMOS processing. Here, we present an optimized fabrication method for mass-producing a single and an array of nanopores on a thick (2 mu m) silicon device layer based on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. A method of temporal voltage variation is exploited to optimize the etching parameters for the nanopore formation during electrochemical breakdown etching, diameters of nanopores around 12 nm have been achieved. Besides, the correlation between the parameters of etching and nanopore diameter is deduced. The processed high-aspect-ratio nanopore enables applications in single-molecule sensing such as DNA, exosomes, viruses, and protein markers. The developed process is inexpensive, fast and can be batch fabricated.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1016/j.snb.2020.129323
Web of Science ID

WOS:000618767400001

Author(s)
Chung, Nguyen Xuan
Gatty, Hithesh Kumar
Lu, Xi
Zhang, Miao  
Linnros, Jan
Date Issued

2021-03-15

Publisher

ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA

Published in
Sensors And Actuators B-Chemical
Volume

331

Article Number

129323

Subjects

Chemistry, Analytical

•

Electrochemistry

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Instruments & Instrumentation

•

Chemistry

•

nanopore

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electrochemical breakdown etching

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high-aspect-ratio

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silicon membranes

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LBEN  
Available on Infoscience
March 26, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/176450
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