This paper reports a versatile nano-sensor technology using “top-down” poly-silicon nanowire field-effect transistors (FETs) in the conventional Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible semiconductor process. The nanowire manufacturing technique reduced nanowire width scaling to 50 nm without use of extra lithography equipment, and exhibited superior device uniformity. These n type polysilicon nanowire FETs have positive pH sensitivity (100 mV/pH) and sensitive deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) detection ability (100 pM) at normal system operation voltages. Specially designed oxide-nitride-oxide buried oxide nanowire realizes an electrically V_th-adjustable sensor to compensate device variation. These nanowire FETs also enable non-volatile memory application for a large and steady V_th adjustment window (>2 V Programming/Erasing window). The CMOS-compatible manufacturing technique of polysilicon nanowire FETs offers a possible solution for commercial System-on-Chip biosensor application, which enables portable physiology monitoring and in situ recording.

The behavior of random telegraph noise was affected by nickel silicide barrier height engineering in advanced nano-CMOS technologies. Contact resistance fluctuations with magnitude of up to 40% were observed when a Schottky barrier was reduced to 0.2 eV. The large contact resistance instability is attributed to the barrier modification by positive charge trapping and detrapping in a Schottky contact. The prevalence and magnitude of the noise are dependent on the contact area, trap density, trap energy, and the silicide Schottky barrier height. In this letter, we propose a fast method to extract the density of responsible contact traps.

Using a self-aligned sidewall microcrystalline-silicon (μc-Si) dual channel, comprising a sub-50-nm channel width, a novel 3-D stackable maskless embedded metal-gate thin-film-transistor nanowire device was fabricated on top metal using a tungsten gate-stack and trilayered oxide/nitride/oxide gate dielectric. The results of using a charge-transferring mechanism based on the solution-phased pH of a phosphate buffer solution and vascular endothelial growth factor showed that μc-Si surfaces exhibit high potential for use in bioelectronics. The device exhibits long-term reliability regarding bioelectronic probing and is as reliable as the commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay when conducting a targeted, 100-day therapy for ovarian cancer. Thus, the proposed device exhibits potential for use in label-free, economical, and highly reliable lab-on-chip 3-D applications.