A negative capacitance field effect transistor with a modified gate stack and drain-side cavity for label-free biosensing

Abstract Dielectrically modulated (DM) negative capacitance field effect transistor (NCFET)-based label-free biosensors have emerged as promising devices for accurate detection of various biomolecules, where the sensitivity of DM architectures strongly depends on the sensing mechanism as well as on the size of the nanocavity. Therefore, to achieve higher sensitivity along with reduced fabrication complexity, we propose to utilize a pre-existing drain-side spacer region as a nanocavity, in a fully depleted silicon-on-insulator-based NCFET architecture. The ferroelectric (FE) layer in the metal-ferroelectric-insulator-semiconductor configuration meaningfully alters the impact of the drain’s electric field on the source-side electrostatics, which results in higher sensitivity. Having quantified the sensitivity of an FE-dielectric (FE-DE) gate-stack-based NCFET biosensor, we now propose to include a paraelectric (PE) layer between the FE and DE materials, thus modifying the gate stack from FE-DE to FE-PE-DE with an equivalent negative capacitance seen from both stacks; here, a remarkable improvement is seen in the FE-PE-DE gate-stack-based NCFET, with nearly identical linearity performance, as seen from the high Pearson’s coefficient value ( r 2 ⩾ 0.9). Therefore, to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed sensing mechanism and the modified gate stack (FE-PE-DE), DE constant ( k Bio ) values in the range of k Bio = 4.5 to k Bio = 75.99 are considered. Finally, the effect of scaling the channel length ( L g ) on the sensitivity of the FE-PE-DE NCFET device is shown, and a high value, particularly at lower permittivity, demonstrates the versatility and wide applicability of the proposed NCFET biosensor.