Design and Sensitivity Analysis of Double Gate Dielectric-Modulated Thyristor for Highly Sensitive Biosensing

Abstract

Biosensors with label-free and rapid detection capabilities have a critical impact on healthcare and environmental monitoring. Biosensors based on field-effect transistor (FET) are one of the most common and successful forms. They can detect the charged biomolecules, but it is impossible to detect the neutral biomolecules. Dielectric-modulated (DM) FETs overcome these limitations. However, as biosensor dimensions shrink to nanoscale for integration into mobile devices, such miniaturization leads to severe leakage current increase followed by standby power consumption, thereby creating a need to mitigate these issues. Thyristor devices have been studied recently in the memory and logic semiconductor fields as a promising candidate due to their low leakage current, high density, and fast operating speed. Taking advantage of these attributes, a thyristor-based DM biosensor with a nanocavity in the gate region to host the analytes is designed in this study and its biosensing characteristics are analyzed using technology computer-aided design (TCAD) simulations. The thyristor-based sensor shows high-voltage sensitivity exceeding 1, indicating its potential in future biosensing.