Investigation of Feasibility of Tunneling Field Effect Transistor (TFET) as Highly Sensitive and Multi-sensing Biosensors

In this letter, we propose the use of tunneling field effect transistors (TFET) as a biosensor that detects bio-molecules on the gate oxide. In TFET sensors, the charges of target molecules accumulated at the surface of the gate oxide bend the energy band of p-i-n structure and thus tunneling current varies with the band bending. Sensing parameters of TFET sensors such as threshold voltage (Vt) shift and on-current (ID) change are extracted as a function of the charge variation. As a result, it is found that the performances of TFET sensors can surpass those of conventional FET (cFET) based sensors in terms of sensitivity. Furthermore, it is verified that the simultaneous sensing of two different target molecules in a TFET sensor can be performed by using the ambipolar behavior of TFET sensors. Consequently, it is revealed that two different molecules can be sensed simultaneously in a read-out circuit since the multi-sensing is carried out at equivalent current level by the ambipolar behavior.