Unraveling the impact of nano-scaling on silicon field-effect transistors for the detection of single-molecules

Electrolyte-gated silicon field-effect transistors (FETs) capable of detecting single molecules could enable high-throughput molecular sensing chips to advance, for example, genomics or proteomics. For solid-gated silicon FETs it is well-known that nano-scaled devices become sensitive to single elementary charges near the silicon-oxide interface. However, in electrolyte-gated FETs, electrolyte screening strongly reduces sensitivity to charges near the gate oxide. The question arises whether nano-scaling electrolyte-gated FETs can entail a sufficiently large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the detection of single molecules. We enhanced a technology computer-aided design tool with electrolyte screening models to calculate the impact of the FET geometry on the single-molecule signal and FET noise. Our continuum FET model shows that a sufficiently large single-molecule SNR is only obtained when nano-scaling all FET channel dimensions. Moreover, we show that the expected scaling trend of the single-molecule SNR breaks down and no longer results in improvements for geometries approaching the decananometer size. This is the characteristic size of the FET channel region modulated by a typical molecule. For gate lengths below 50 nm, the overlap of the modulated region with the highly conductive junctions leads to saturation of the SNR. For cross-sections below 10-30 nm, SNR degrades due to the overlap of the modulated region with the convex FET corners where a larger local gate capacitance reduces charge sensitivity. In our study, assuming a commercial solid-state FET noise amplitude, we find that a suspended nanowire FET architecture with 35 nm length and 5 × 10 nm² cross-section results in the highest SNR of about 10 for a 15-base DNA oligo in a 15 mM electrolyte. In contrast with typical silicon nanowire FET sensors which possess micron-scale gate lengths, we find it to be key that all channel dimensions are scaled down to the decananometer range.