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Silicon Nanowires for Biosensing

Puppo, Francesca  
•
Carrara, Sandro  
•
De Micheli, Giovanni  
May 4, 2018
Encyclopedia of Interfacial Chemistry: Surface Science and Electrochemistry

Over the past 20 years, nanomaterials, such as quantum dots, nanoparticles, nanowires(NWs), nanotubes, and graphene, have received enormous attention due to their suitable properties for designing novel nanoscale biosensors. Nanomaterials are very small structures with at least one of their dimensions in the nanoscale (10 nm range).The size of these nanostructures is comparable to those of biomolecular and chemical pecies and thus provides a perfect feature to study most biological entities, such as nucleic acids, proteins, viruses, and cells.In addition, the high surface-to-volume ratio for nanomaterials allows a huge proportion of the constituent atoms in the material to be located at, or close to, the surface. As a consequence, surface atoms play an extremely important role in determining the physical, chemical, and electrical properties of nanomaterials, making them very sensitive devices capable of low concentration and even single-molecule detection. Among nanomaterials, NWs have become significant candidates for nanoscale-sensing applications. NWs are extremely small wires with cross section in the nanoscale size. Thanks to their size, NWs have distinct and diverse electrical, physical, and mechanical properties that are not shared by the corresponding bulk material. NWs can be made from metallic (Ni, Pt, Au), dielectric (ZiO,TiO2), composite, or semiconductor (Si,GaN,InP) materials. For the purpose of bio-or chemical sensing, semiconductor materials are typically used, due to the electronic property of semiconductors that can be easily tuned via doping and applied gate voltages, providing also a way for affecting the sensitivity capabilities. Within the subclass of semiconducting NWs, silicon NWs (SiNWs) are often used for the fabrication of biosensors. Indeed, SiNWs can benefit from existing and mature silicon industry processing and be easily integrated with well-developed field effect transistor (FET) technology. Moreover, SiNW surfaces can be readily modified thanks to well-established silicon and silicon oxide functionalization techniques, thus making SiNW-FETs particularly attractive for the label-free detection of biological species.

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Type
book part or chapter
DOI
10.1016/B978-0-12-409547-2.13479-1
Author(s)
Puppo, Francesca  
Carrara, Sandro  
De Micheli, Giovanni  
Date Issued

2018-05-04

Publisher

Elsevier

Published in
Encyclopedia of Interfacial Chemistry: Surface Science and Electrochemistry
ISBN of the book

9780128097397

Total of pages

499-510

Series title/Series vol.

7

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LSI1  
Available on Infoscience
May 17, 2018
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/146471
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