Improved Sensing Capability of Integrated Semiconducting Metal Oxide Gas Sensor Devices

A Novel Packaging of the MEMS Gas Sensors Used for Harsh Outdoor and Human Exhale Sampling Applications

Dust or condensed water present in harsh outdoor or high-humidity human breath samples are one of the key sources that cause false detection in Micro Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) gas sensors. This paper proposes a novel packaging mechanism for MEMS gas sensors that utilizes a self-anchoring mechanism to embed a hydrophobic polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) filter into the upper cover of the gas sensor packaging. This approach is distinct from the current method of external pasting. The proposed packaging mechanism is successfully demonstrated in this study. The test results indicate that the innovative packaging with the PTFE filter reduced the average response value of the sensor to the humidity range of 75~95% RH by 60.6% compared to the packaging without the PTFE filter. Additionally, the packaging passed the High-Accelerated Temperature and Humidity Stress (HAST) reliability test. With a similar sensing mechanism, the proposed packaging embedded with a PTFE filter can be further employed for the application of exhalation-related, such as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), breath screening.

Application of Two-Dimensional Materials towards CMOS-Integrated Gas Sensors

During the last few decades, the microelectronics industry has actively been investigating the potential for the functional integration of semiconductor-based devices beyond digital logic and memory, which includes RF and analog circuits, biochips, and sensors, on the same chip. In the case of gas sensor integration, it is necessary that future devices can be manufactured using a fabrication technology which is also compatible with the processes applied to digital logic transistors. This will likely involve adopting the mature complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication technique or a technique which is compatible with CMOS due to the inherent low costs, scalability, and potential for mass production that this technology provides. While chemiresistive semiconductor metal oxide (SMO) gas sensors have been the principal semiconductor-based gas sensor technology investigated in the past, resulting in their eventual commercialization, they need high-temperature operation to provide sufficient energies for the surface chemical reactions essential for the molecular detection of gases in the ambient. Therefore, the integration of a microheater in a MEMS structure is a requirement, which can be quite complex. This is, therefore, undesirable and room temperature, or at least near-room temperature, solutions are readily being investigated and sought after. Room-temperature SMO operation has been achieved using UV illumination, but this further complicates CMOS integration. Recent studies suggest that two-dimensional (2D) materials may offer a solution to this problem since they have a high likelihood for integration with sophisticated CMOS fabrication while also providing a high sensitivity towards a plethora of gases of interest, even at room temperature. This review discusses many types of promising 2D materials which show high potential for integration as channel materials for digital logic field effect transistors (FETs) as well as chemiresistive and FET-based sensing films, due to the presence of a sufficiently wide band gap. This excludes graphene from this review, while recent achievements in gas sensing with graphene oxide, reduced graphene oxide, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), phosphorene, and MXenes are examined.

Metal Oxide Chemiresistors: A Structural and Functional Comparison between Nanowires and Nanoparticles

Metal oxide nanowires have become popular materials in gas sensing, and more generally in the field of electronic and optoelectronic devices. This is thanks to their unique structural and morphological features, namely their single-crystalline structure, their nano-sized diameter and their highly anisotropic shape, i.e., a large length-to-diameter aspect ratio. About twenty years have passed since the first publication proposing their suitability for gas sensors, and a rapidly increasing number of papers addressing the understanding and the exploitation of these materials in chemosensing have been published. Considering the remarkable progress achieved so far, the present paper aims at reviewing these results, emphasizing the comparison with state-of-the-art nanoparticle-based materials. The goal is to highlight, wherever possible, how results may be related to the particular features of one or the other morphology, what is effectively unique to nanowires and what can be obtained by both. Transduction, receptor and utility-factor functions, doping, and the addition of inorganic and organic coatings will be discussed on the basis of the structural and morphological features that have stimulated this field of research since its early stage.

Morphological Effects in SnO2 Chemiresistors for Ethanol Detection: A Review in Terms of Central Performances and Outliers

SnO₂ is one of the most studied materials in gas sensing and is often used as a benchmark for other metal oxide-based gas sensors. To optimize its structural and functional features, the fine tuning of the morphology in nanoparticles, nanowires, nanosheets and their eventual hierarchical organization has become an active field of research. In this paper, the different SnO₂ morphologies reported in literature in the last five years are systematically compared in terms of response amplitude through a statistical approach. To have a dataset as homogeneous as possible, which is necessary for a reliable comparison, the analysis is carried out on sensors based on pure SnO₂, focusing on ethanol detection in a dry air background as case study. Concerning the central performances of each morphology, results indicate that none clearly outperform the others, while a few individual materials emerge as remarkable outliers with respect to the whole dataset. The observed central performances and outliers may represent a suitable reference for future research activities in the field.

Thermo-Electro-Mechanical Simulation of Semiconductor Metal Oxide Gas Sensors

There is a growing demand in the semiconductor industry to integrate many functionalities on a single portable device. The integration of sensor fabrication with the mature CMOS technology has made this level of integration a reality. However, sensors still require calibration and optimization before full integration. For this, modeling and simulation is essential, since attempting new, innovative designs in a laboratory requires a long time and expensive tests. In this manuscript we address aspects for the modeling and simulation of semiconductor metal oxide gas sensors, devices which have the highest potential for integration because of their CMOS-friendly fabrication capability and low operating power. We analyze recent advancements using FEM models to simulate the thermo-electro-mechanical behavior of the sensors. These simulations are essentials to calibrate the design choices and ensure low operating power and improve reliability. The primary consumer of power is a microheater which is essential to heat the sensing film to appropriately high temperatures in order to initiate the sensing mechanism. Electro-thermal models to simulate its operation are presented here, using FEM and the Cauer network model. We show that the simpler Cauer model, which uses an electrical circuit to model the thermo-electrical behavior, can efficiently reproduce experimental observations.