Investigation of the dielectrically modulated electron hole bilayer tunnel field effect transistor for biomolecule detections

Abstract

This work investigates a Dielectrically Modulated Electron-Hole Bilayer Tunnel Field Effect Transistor (DM-EHBTFET) architecture for biosensing applications using extensive numerical device simulation. The proposed DM-EHBTFET structure incorporates extended source and drain pockets in the channel to ensure vertical band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) dominated transduction. The underlying device physics and sensing performance of the proposed DM-EHBTFET has been comprehensively analyzed based on the tunneling length sensitivity and drain current sensitivity, respectively. Finally, an extensive comparative performance study has been undertaken against conventional lateral tunneling (LT) and vertical tunneling (VT) based DMTFETs, as well as reported state-of-art DMTFETs and DMFETs. The results demonstrate that the optimized DM-EHBTFET outperforms both conventional LT-/VT- DMTFETs with more than 500 times and 150 times improvements in sensitivity, respectively, over a range of biomolecule specifications, and more than 100 times sensitivity improvement has been observed in DM-EHBTFET over reported DMFETs/DMTFETs for lower biomolecule dielectric constant.