A Vertically Stacked Nanosheet Gate-All-Around FET for Biosensing Application
Cong Li, Fei-Chen Liu, Ru Han, Yiqi Zhuang
Abstract
In this paper, a vertically stacked nanosheet gate-all-around field-effect transistor (GAA-NSFET) as a label-free biosensor has been proposed and investigated. The influences of different biomolecules on the biosensor’s electrical properties are analyzed, and the proposed biosensor exhibits good sensitivity for both neutral and charged biomolecules. Furthermore, a deep sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate the sensing ability of biosensors with different channel structures. The sensitivity variation of biosensors is analyzed in terms of subthreshold swing ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$SS $ </tex-math></inline-formula> ), threshold voltage ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {th}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ), and current switching ratio ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I_{\text {on}} / I_{\text {off}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ). The results show that GAA-NSFET-based biosensor obtains the best sensitivity compared with other biosensors (including nanowire FET-based biosensor and vertically stacked nanowire FET-based biosensor) due to its larger channel width and multi-channels. Also, the influences of filling position on sensitivity are analyzed in various cases for the proposed biosensor. Its sensitivity depends on the filling amounts of biomolecules instead of the filling position. Finally, a status map is presented, which plots the sensitivity of some important works in biosensing application along with the sensitivity of the proposed biosensor, and GAA-NSFET-based biosensor is more sensitive compared with those works in terms of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I_{\text {on}}/I_{\text {off}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> sensitivity.