(672g) Invited Speaker: Electrolyte Gated Transistors with Floating Gates As Biosensors

Electrolyte gated transistors (EGTs) are a sub-class of thin film transistors that are extremely promising for biological sensing applications. These devices employ a solid electrolyte as the gate insulator; the very large capacitance of the electrolyte results in low voltage operation and high transconductance or gain when incorporated into an inverter architecture. This talk will describe the fabrication of floating gate EGTs and their use as protein sensors. The floating gate EGT (FG-EGT, or simply FGT) design allows separation of the semiconductor channel from the analyte capture surface. That is, two electrolyte compartments are employed, one that coats an arm of the floating gate and the semiconductor source-drain channel, and the other that coats the capture surface on the other arm of the floating gate and an electrically addressable control gate. The capture surface is coated with aptamers or antibodies that selectively bind the molecular target. Having two separate electrolyte compartments prevents contamination of the semiconductor with the analyte solution and allows optimization of the response of the device independent of surface chemistry. This talk will describe the fundamental operating principles of the FGT and its implementation in a sub-1 V differential amplifier sensor scheme for label-free protein detection. Prospects for generalizing the FGT platform to other analyte classes will also be discussed.