In-House Development of Shear Horizontal Acoustic Waves Based Sensitive Sensors for Bacterial Pathogens Detection

Abstract

Surface acoustic wave can be generated at the free surface of an elastic solid. Interdigital transducers (IDTs) are fabricated on the piezoelectric substrate surface that will act as electrical input and output port. When appropriate AC voltage stimulus is applied to the input transducer, surface acoustic wave will be produced. The output or receiving port will detect the incident surface acoustic wave and convert it back to a suitably filtered electrical once. For this property, surface acoustic based devices were initially developed for the telecommunication purpose such as signal filters and resonators. SAW based devices have been modified to be sensors later on from for gas detections and have been moving towards biological detections recently for its ultra-sensitivity to surface perturbation. The main component of this device is the IDTs. Recently, there are several methods to produce IDTs; Ultra-Violet (UV), deep UV lithography, Electron beam (e-beam) lithography and X-ray lithography. Although, these methods can produce very fine and accurate electrodes in term of submicron size but the costs are extremely expensive. Thus, this paper will discuss the conventional CMOS method which is much more economical to produce the applicable IDTs for the bacterial pathogens sensing purpose. Shear horizontal surface acoustic wave (SHSAW), one of the SAW based types is used in this paper as it is most suitable for the liquid based application as it has the advantage of acoustic energy is not being radiated into liquid.