Organic Vapour Sensing Properties of Area-Ordered and Size-Controlled Silicon Nanopillar
Wei Li,
Zhilin Feng,
Enwen Dai,
Jie Xu,
Gang Bai
Affiliations
Wei Li
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
Zhilin Feng
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
Enwen Dai
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
Jie Xu
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
Gang Bai
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
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.
