Highly sensitive and selective detection of various volatile organic compounds (VOCs) has been most needed in a wide range of fields, such as medical diagnosis, health supervision, industry-process control, and environmental monitoring. Since a semiconductor-type gas sensor is a typical promising candidate among various portable VOC-sensing devices, many efforts on developing these gas sensors are introduced in this article for the first time. Through some development stages, it has been well known that the temperature-modulated operation of gas sensors is one of effective ways to improve the magnitude of VOC responses. On the other hand, catalytic combustion-type gas sensors operated with a mode of pulse-driven heating were developed in the early 2000s, and they are named as "adsorption/combustion-type gas sensors" after their gas-sensing mechanism, based on the combustion of VOC adsorbates on the sensing material. The representative VOC-sensing properties of the adsorption/combustion-type gas sensors and recent material-design approach to achieve highly sensitive and selective VOC detection are summarized in this article.
Keywords: Adsorption/combustion-type gas sensors; MEMS; VOC; temperature modulation.