About 20 Years of Silicon‐Based Thin‐Film Sensors with Chalcogenide Glass Materials for Heavy Metal Analysis: Technological Aspects of Fabrication and Miniaturization

Abstract

Chalcogenide glass materials as membranes for potentiometric sensors for chemical analysis in solutions, e.g., ionselective electrodes, have been studied for more than three decades. Already in the 1970s, first papers dealt with the ion-sensing properties of chalcogenide glasses, followed by systematic investigations of their solid-state chemistry, the sensing mechanism and their analytical characteristics. Combining the analytical performance of chalcogenide glass membranes with techniques originally invented for semiconductor processing, a new generation of silicon-based thinfilm sensors with chalcogenide glass materials for heavy metal detection has been created. In the beginning, co-sputtering of Cu and As 2 Se 3 resulted in a Cu 2þ -selective field-effect sensor, while in recent years, a variety of chalcogenide glass materials have been stoichiometrically deposited onto ISFETs (ion-sensitive field-effect transistor), EIS (electrolyte-insulator-semiconductor), LAPS (light-addressable potentiometric sensor) and mISE structures, respectively, serving as miniaturized chemical sensors. The present review paper is devoted to research and development in the field of silicon-based thin-film sensors with chalcogenide glass materials and emphasizes technological aspects of fabrication and miniaturization within the last 20 years.

Ion-Selective Electrodes for Detection of Lead (II) in Drinking Water: A Mini-Review

“…Compared to polycrystalline ISEs, ChG glass membranes have the advantages of high selectivity, excellent lifetime, and good chemical durability, although the fabrication of ChG glass electrodes often requires using an expensive technique such as pulsed laser deposition (PLD) [79,80]. Different chalcogenide glass systems (e.g., GeSe 2 -PbSe-PbTe, PbS-AgI-As 2 S 3 , and Pb-Ag-As-I-S) have been investigated as ISE membrane materials and were found to achieve a limit of detection as low as 1 × 10 −7 M [81][82][83].…”

A Novel Thin‐Film Copper Array Based on an Organic/Inorganic Sensor Hybrid: Microfabrication, Potentiometric Characterization, and Flow‐Injection Analysis Application

“…For both the organic and inorganic parts of the sensor hybrid, first metallic transducer layers with a gold top layer have been deposited by electron-beam evaporation and photolithographically patterned. Details of preparation are described in [21]. A printed circuit board for the sensor chips was fabricated for housing them.…”

“…The first attempts in integrating these materials in multisensor arrays have been demonstrated to overcome their insufficient selectivity [12,21]. In the same analogue, researchers were interested in the microfabrication of organic membrane-based thin-film sensors with the aim of highest possible selectivity enhancement.…”

Selective Synthesis of Fe7Se8 Polyhedra with Exposed High‐Index Facets and Fe7Se8 Nanorods by a Solvothermal Process in a Binary Solution and Their Collective Intrinsic Properties

“…Iron chalcogenides belong to an important family of inorganic functional materials that have been studied extensively due to their wide applications in solar cells, [1] lithium batteries, [2,3] sensors, [4] thermoelectric devices, [5] spin electronic devices, [6] etc. Recently, the exciting discovery of superconductivity with zero-resistance transition temperature at 8 K in the PbO-type a-FeSe compound [7] has made iron chalcogenides a very hot research topic.…”