Low drift and small hysteresis characteristics of diamond electrolyte-solution-gate FET

Abstract

We have investigated drift and hysteresis characteristics on an electrolyte-solution-gate field-effect transistor (SGFET) with a unique structure using polycrystalline diamond and verified the possibility as chemical sensors and biosensors. Silicon-based ion-sensitive field effect transistors (ISFETs) have not yet solved such time-related issues due to the chemical instability of the passivation layer covering on SiO2 and that is why the Si-ISFET is not wide spread. First of all, we have confirmed that the pH sensitivities of oxygen- and amine-terminated diamond surfaces are 20 mV/pH and 48 mV/pH, respectively, whereas that of hydrogen-terminated surface is only 7 mV/pH. Drift characteristics measurement on diamond SGFET reveals that diamond SGFETs with any surface termination are more stable in electrolyte solution than Si-ISFETs with typical passivation membranes. Hysteresis width, which is known to be a more serious cause of measurement error than drift, proves to be 0.39 mV on amine-terminated SGFET. This is less than 1/10 compared with common Si3N4-ISFET. These results can be explained by high tolerance of diamond against ions in solution due to intrinsic chemical stability and densely packed structure of diamond itself. In this work, we bear out that diamond SGFET is a promising platform for highly sensitive biosensor application owing to the superiority in terms of time response and resulting measurement accuracy.