Silicon nanowire structures for neuronal cell interfacing
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Beschreibung
During last decade silicon nanowire (NW) field effect transistors (FETs) attracted
considerable attention of researchers as perfect candidates for development of highly sensitive and
reliable biosensors, which are compatible with cost-efficient CMOS technology. Recently the
liquid-gated FETs were used to demonstrate proof of principle extracellular measurements of
neuronal cells action potential, which is of great interest regarding the large variety of applications
like monitoring of electrical communication within neuronal networks, transmission paths of ionic
channels etc. The NWs are expected to provide an improved contact between neuronal cells and
NW surface, which is of crucial importance for signal transduction from the cell to the channel of
the NW. However, it is still challenging to establish robust tool for the extracellular monitoring of
electrogenic cell activity. One of the important milestones of the research in this area is the signalto-
noise ratio (SNR), which determines the detection limit of such type of sensors. Therefore,
current work is devoted to design, technology development and fabrication of Si NW FET
structures for neuronal cell interfacing and characterizing of their transport properties and
reliability utilizing technique of noise spectroscopy. During the work we study the transport
properties of single Si NW FET transistors, in order to improve understanding of the factors
influencing SNR of the NW biosensors. The results demonstrate modulation effect of the channel
current by single trap located in the gate dielectric, which reflects extreme charge sensitivity of the
NW FET devices. Arising from these investigations we developed and fabricated the Si NW FET
structures based on arrays of 50 NWs connected in parallel. Fabricated liquid-gated NW FET
structures are characterized in order to find optimal regimes of operation. The revealed front-back
gate coupling effect was used to improve the SNR of the fabricated devices by 50%. According to
our measurements, the developed Si NW FET structures meet the requirements needed for
extracellular detection of the neuronal cell activity. The interface between neuronal cells and
fabricated structures was studied using FIB technique. The results demonstrate that the cells contact
NWs without a cleft
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