Advances in Nanowire Transistor‐Based Biosensors

Abstract

Semiconducting nanowires (NWs) present new opportunities for developing electrical biosensors due to their inherent properties, including large surface‐to‐volume ratio, rapid signal response, configurability in electronic devices, and nanoscale footprint comparable to biomolecular and subcellular structures. Field‐effect transistors (FETs) based on silicon nanowires (SiNWs) have proven to be a powerful and versatile tool in the biomedical fields. Recent advances in SiNW‐FET biosensors, including fundamental aspects and working principles, preparation of nanowires, and surface functionalization, as well as applications in biological analysis and cellular investigation, are discussed here. It is envisioned that nano‐FET devices will have several applications in fields such as clinical diagnosis, point‐of‐care testing, and screening for early disease.

Point-of-care diagnostics for infectious diseases: From methods to devices

“…Electrochemical biosensors are one kind of the most popular detection methods for the detection of all kinds diseases, due to their advantages of short detection time, instrumental simplicity, low cost and portability, holding a great potential for POC diagnostic applications [85] , [86] , [87] , [88] , [89] . As a result, various electrochemical biosensors have been explored for the applications in the development of POC diagnostic platforms, including voltammetric/amperometric biosensors [90] , [91] , [92] , [93] , [94] , impedimetric biosensors [95] , [96] , potentiometric biosensors [97] , and field-effect transistor (FET) based biosensors [98] , [99] .…”

Atomic layer deposition for biosensing applications

“…Due to the popularity of FET type biosensors (Li et al, 2018;Sarkar et al, 2014;Zafar et al, 2018), most of the applications of ALD in biosensing have been focused so far on depositing high dielectric materials. Nonetheless, materials with high refractive index and high catalytic activity have also been reported.…”

Ultrasensitive and stable all graphene field‐effect transistor‐based Hg2+ sensor constructed by using different covalently bonded RGO films assembled by different conjugate linking molecules

“…To overcome these concerns, a series of optimization methods have been innovated, such as the design and synthesis of solution‐resistant polymer semiconductor materials, 11–14 the introduction of protective structures on FETs, 15,16 and the construction of epitaxial grids 17,18 . While these methods prevent the interference of external forces on electrical signals to some extent, they typically suffer from complicated preparation steps, expensive processing techniques, and the degeneration of device performance 19 …”