A Mg2Si/Si heterojunction based dielectric modulated dopingless TFET biosensor for label free detection

Abstract

In this work, we contrasted the potential of Mg2Si/Si heterojunction-based dopingless (DL) double gate tunnel field effect transistor (DGTFET) with conventional (C)-DL-DGTFET. The simulation results exhibit excellent capabilities of Mg2Si source DL-DGTFET in terms of electrical properties, that are ION, ION/IOFF, electron tunnelling rate, Vth and SS in comparison to C-DL-TFET. A remarkable improvement of 77.5 % and 81.3 % is observed while computing Vth and SS, in the case of Mg2Si source DL-DGTFET. For that reason, to avail most advantage of Mg2Si/Si heterojunction, the proposed device with similar specifications and dimensions is critically analysed for biosensing applications. Dual cavities (20 nm x 5 nm) are carved underneath gate electrodes near source channel junction to grab the biomolecules. The proposed biosensor (Mg2Si source DL-DGTFET) exhibits significant sensitivity results for both charged (deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)) and uncharged (neutral) biomolecules. Also, we have reported an impact on biosensor sensitivity with variation in the height of nanocavity (tbio). The effect of steric hindrance on sensitivity is analysed by considering four step profiles - increasing, decreasing, convex and concave. The result reveals the competency of Mg2Si/Si heterojunction DL-DGTFET in terms of overall device sensitivity.