Organic Vapour Sensing Properties of Area-Ordered and Size-Controlled Silicon Nanopillar

Wei Li; Zhilin Feng; Enwen Dai; Jie Xu; Gang Bai

doi:10.3390/s16111880

Organic Vapour Sensing Properties of Area-Ordered and Size-Controlled Silicon Nanopillar

Sensors (Basel). 2016 Nov 9;16(11):1880. doi: 10.3390/s16111880.

Authors

Wei Li^{1

2

3}, Zhilin Feng⁴, Enwen Dai⁵, Jie Xu⁶, Gang Bai^{7

8}

Affiliations

¹ State-Province Joint Engineering Laboratory for RF Integration and Micropackaging, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China. Liw@njupt.edu.cn.
² State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin Films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China. Liw@njupt.edu.cn.
³ Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China. Liw@njupt.edu.cn.
⁴ State-Province Joint Engineering Laboratory for RF Integration and Micropackaging, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China. 1215022733@njupt.edu.cn.
⁵ State-Province Joint Engineering Laboratory for RF Integration and Micropackaging, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China. 1015020833@njupt.edu.cn.
⁶ State-Province Joint Engineering Laboratory for RF Integration and Micropackaging, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China. jiexu@njupt.edu.cn.
⁷ State-Province Joint Engineering Laboratory for RF Integration and Micropackaging, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China. Baigang@njupt.edu.cn.
⁸ Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China. Baigang@njupt.edu.cn.

Abstract

Here, a silicon nanopillar array (Si-NPA) was fabricated. It was studied as a room-temperature organic vapour sensor, and the ethanol and acetone gas sensing properties were detected with I-V curves. I-V curves show that these Si-NPA gas sensors are sensitive to ethanol and acetone organic vapours. The turn-on threshold voltage is about 0.5 V and the operating voltage is 3 V. With 1% ethanol gas vapour, the response time is 5 s, and the recovery time is 15 s. Furthermore, an evaluation of the gas sensor stability for Si-NPA was performed. The gas stability results are acceptable for practical detections. These excellent sensing characteristics can mainly be attributed to the change of the overall dielectric constant of Si-NPA caused by the physisorption of gas molecules on the pillars, and the filling of the gas vapour in the voids.

Keywords: gas sensing; ordered silicon nanopillar; organic vapour.