Polymer surface electrochemistry for charge-based sensing in chemoreceptive neuron MOS (CvMOS) transistors

The charge-based sensing in chemoreceptive neuron MOS (CvMOS) transistors with the extended floating-gate structure has brought forth unique features that are beneficial to the system integration of chemical sensing. Surface chemical functionalization by polymers as the sensing-gate coatings has been employed to selectively sense polar and electrolytic fluids, which are physically isolated front the integrated CMOS circuitry with the modular insulation scheme. The repeatable measurement results have shown both good sensitivity and selectivity. The subthreshold-slope responses for various surface coatings have been analyzed and the corresponding circuitry utilizing the high transconductance gain in the CMOS transistors has been proposed to rapidly extract the encoded information for the CvMOS devices.