Nanotechnology to Prevent Charge Transfer

This chapter is the second chapter dealing with nanotechnology. In contrast to the previous chapter, nanotech is proposed here to improve the performance of Bio/CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) interfaces. This improvement is obtained here by preventing electron transfer at the interface, when that is the case. Therefore, several techniques are then learned to diminish the probability of electron exchange between working electrodes and chemicals of the solution as much as possible. In particular, the chapter proposes different approaches to close all the pathways that could bring the solution ions in direct contact with the surface of the working electrodes. To show the efficacy of those different approaches, the electrical properties of the resulting Bio/CMOS interfaces are deeply investigated with respect to their morphology at the nanoscale. Both the case of DNA capacitive detection and the case of the potentiometric detection of ions with selective membranes are shown, and ways to improve the related Bio/CMOS interface are discussed in detail by also using nanotechnologies learned in the previous chapter.