Impact of buried oxide thickness in substrate-gate integrated silicon nanowire field-effect transistor biosensor performance for charge sensing

The paper investigated on performance in charge sensing for substrate-gate integrated silicon nanowire field-effect transistor biosensor at different thickness of the buried oxide layer, sandwiched in between the top-silicon and substrate layers. The device structures with different buried oxide thickness ranging from 100 to 200 nm were designed and simulated using the Silvaco ATLAS device simulation software. The increase of buried oxide thickness reduced the strength of induced electric field that contributes to the formation of inversion layer for current flow through the silicon nanowire channel, hence contributed to the increase in threshold voltage. For simulation of charge sensing, the device demonstrated the ability to identify different interface charge values ranging from -5×1010 to -9×1010 e· cm−2 applied on the surface of the silicon nanowire channel to represent target charge biomolecules that bound to the biosensor in actual detection. Significant change in threshold voltage can be observed due to the applied interface charge density values and was evaluated to determine the sensitivity for charge sensing performance. The device shows better performance when designed with buried oxide thickness of 200 nm at sensitivity of 1.151 V/e· cm−2.