Characteristics and Modeling of a Nonplanar Nonrectangular Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor for Charge Sensing in the Si Micro-Fluidic Channel

Abstract

In this work, a nonplanar, nonrectangular metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) with an asymmetrical channel structure for sensing charge in the Si micro-fluidic channel was fabricated, and the electrical characteristics of the fabricated three-dimensional (3-D) MOSFET were measured. The device was formed in the convex corner of a Si micro-fluidic channel using tetramethyl ammonium hydroxide (TMAH) anistropic etching solution, so that it would be suitable for combination with a micro-fluidic system. We approximated the nonplanar, nonrectangular 3-D MOSFET to a two-dimensional rectangular structure using the Schwartz-Christoffel transformation. The LEVEL1 device parameters of the 3-D MOSFET were extracted from the measured electrical device characteristics and were used in a simulation program with integrated circuit emphasis (SPICE) simulation. The measured and simulated results for the 3-D MOSFET were compared and found to show good agreement. We also investigated the feasibility of the proposed 3-D MOSFET as a charge sensor for detecting charged biomolecules.