Nanoelectronics and Nanosensors

The need and importance of reliable and miniature gas sensors as a means of alert against the dispersion of hazardous materials exist for several decades.  To meet these needs, a new generation of integrated sensors e.g. in wearables or personal assistants (e.g. smartphones) is evolving and constantly improving with respect to performance, level of device integration and integration in smarter and smarter sensor networks for internet of things (IoT) applications.

 

Our group is developing robust, very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) and thus mass-production compatible, smart sensors based on CMOS technology; our sensor is called Electrostatic-Formed Nanowire (EFN). The most prominent advantage of the EFN is the ability to control the size, shape and the location of its channel post fabrication. This allows to tune and optimize the EFN sensitivity for different analytes. Another notable feature is the multi-gate geometry that creates several degrees of freedom and this is ideal for the e-Nose principle based on machine learning algorithms.

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