In this study, a range of miniaturized Ag/AgCl reference electrodes with various layouts were successfully fabricated on wafer-level silicon-based substrates with metallic intermediate layers by precisely controlling the electrochemical deposition of Ag, followed by electrochemical chlorination of the deposited Ag layer. The structure, as well as the chemical composition of the electrode, were characterized with SEM & EDS. The results showed that the chlorination is very sensitive to the applied electric field and background solution. Potentiostatic chlorination, in combination with an adjusted mushroom-shaped Ag sealing deposition, enabled the formation of electrochemical usable Ag/AgCl layers. The stability of the electrodes was tested using open circuit potential (OCP) measurement. The results showed that the reference electrodes stayed stable for 300 s under 3 M KCl solution. The first stage study showed that the stability of the Ag/AgCl reference electrode in a chip highly depends on chip size design, chlorination conditions, and a further protection layer.
Keywords: chlorination; reference electrodes; silver/silver chloride; underlying metal layers.