TCAD Device Modeling and Simulation Study of Organic Field Effect Transistor-Based pH Sensor with Tunable Sensitivity for Surpassing Nernst Limit

A dual-gate organic field effect transistor (DG-OFET)-based pH sensor is proposed that will be able to detect the variations in the aqueous (electrolyte) medium. In this structure, a source-sided underlap technique with a dual-gate sensing approach has been used. The change in ON-current (I-ON) was observed due to parallel examination of electrolytes in two gates underlapping the region of the structure. For the evaluation of the sensitivity of DG-OFET, the change in the drain current was exploited for different pH and corresponding charge densities utilizing 2D physics-based numerical simulation. The simulation results were extracted with the help of the software package Silvaco TCAD-ATLAS. The simulated results display that the proposed DG-OFET shows significantly higher sensitivity for high-k dielectrics. The voltage sensitivity achieved by DG-OFET with SiO2 as a dielectric in our work is 217.53 mV/pH which surpasses the Nernst Limit nearly four times. However, using a high-k dielectric (Ta2O5) increases it further to 555.284 mV/pH which is more than nine times the Nernst Limit. The DG-OFET pH sensor has a lot of potential in the future for various flexible sensing applications due to its flexibility, being highly sensitive, biocompatible and low-cost.

Automated summary

A dual-gate organic field effect transistor (DG-OFET)-based pH sensor is proposed for detecting variations in aqueous medium. The change in ON-current was observed by examining electrolytes in two gates underlapping the structure. Numerical simulations showed that the proposed DG-OFET has significantly higher sensitivity, especially with high-k dielectrics.