Sapphire-supported nanopores for low-noise DNA sensing

Solid-state nanopores have broad applications from single-molecule biosensing to diagnostics and sequencing. The high capacitive noise from conventionally used conductive silicon substrates, however, has seriously limited both their sensing accuracy and recording speed. A new approach is proposed here for forming nanopore membranes on insulating sapphire wafers to promote low-noise nanopore sensing. Anisotmpic wet etching of sapphire through micro-patterned triangular masks is used to demonstrate the feasibility of scalable formation of small (<25 mu m) membranes with a size deviation of less than 7 mu m over two 2-inch wafers. For validation, a sapphire-supported (SaS) nanopore chip with a 100 times larger membrane area than conventional nanopores was tested, which showed 130 times smaller capacitance (10 pF) and 2.6 times smaller root-mean-square (RMS) noise current (18-21 pA over 100 kHz bandwidth, with 50-150 mV bias) when compared to a silicon-supported (SiS) nanopore (similar to 1.3 nF, and 46-51 pA RMS noise). Tested with 1k base-pair double-stranded DNA, the SaS nanopore enabled sensing at microsecond speed with a signal-to-noise ratio of 21, compared to 11 from a SiS nanopore. This SaS nanopore presents a manufacturable nanoelectmnic platform feasible for high-speed and low-noise sensing of a variety of biomolecules.

Automated summary

Solid-state nanopores have various applications in single-molecule biosensing and sequencing, but high capacitive noise from conventional silicon substrates limits their performance. A new approach using insulating sapphire wafers for nanopore membranes is proposed, demonstrating scalable formation of small membranes with low noise sensing capabilities.