Hien Duy Tong writes:
With many unique properties and promising functions, nanowires and nanowire-based devices have been extensively studied around the world recently.
To imagine about how small the nanowire is; your hair has a diameter of 50.000 – 100.000 nm, while nanowires have been defined as wires with at least one dimension in the range of 1-100 nm. It means that you have to put at ca. 1000*1000*1000 = one billion nanowires together to have the size of your hair.
A major different of materials in the nanowire form is that materials are mostly distributed on a surface, leading to an ultrahigh surface-to-volume ratio. This fact makes many new phenomena like the quantum confinement effect inside the nanowires, surface process like adsorption and desorption etc. to be easily taken place. As a result, these new shape of materials - the nanowires - exhibit a variety of interesting and fascinating properties, and may function as the building blocks for nanoscale electronics, nanooptics, and especially for nanosensing technology etc. E.g., in comparison with conventional gas sensors that need to be operated at high temperature, semiconducting oxide nanowire gas sensors can be operated at room temperature (low power consumption) and quickly detect various gases at concentrations of parts per million (ppm), or even parts per trillion (ppb).
Another example is the single crystalline silicon nanowire sensor. Very recently, this nanowire sensor has been used to detect (bio-)chemical species at very low concentrations, even at the molecular level. Single viruses and bacteria, DNA and DNA sequence variations, small molecule protein interactions etc., can now be detected. In addition, the sensor allows real-time and online detection with a quick respond time. These new capabilities are a great development in the sensor field, and are beyond what conventional (bio) sensors can do. The just developed sensor has thus opened up many new research possibilities and practical applications in many fields, including important and quickly developed sectors like health care, life sciences, pharmacy, and biotechnology.
General speaking, all these capabilities of nanowire sensors are beyond that of conventional sensors.
Although nanowire-based devices possess a variety of interesting properties and promising functions, the advantage in the utilization, and especially commercialization, of nanowires had been relatively slow, probably due to difficulties associated with the synthesis of such nanostructures with well-controlled size, phase purity, crystallinity, chemical composition, and an integration of individual nanowires into a complete device. Therefore we may say that nanowire study and applications have been just existing in the world of (advanced) laboratory.
Recently, using the very latest of semiconductor techniques, our company_Nanosens company, is able to produce highly uniform, long, and small nanowires of various materials in the silicon chip. In addition, the nanowire chip has macro contact electrodes at the both ends, allow them to be easily connected to outer-world, e.g., electronics controlling. Especially, we produce the nanowire chips at a greatly reduced fabrication cost. We call this chip "nanowire chips, ready for application". The product displayed on our webpage (http://www.nanosens.nl) is the first product in what will be a much wider family of nanowire products of different wire sizes, wire densities, and wire materials.
Specifications of our recently made nanowire chips:
Nanowire width (down to 10-nm)' Nanowire thickness(as thin as 10-nm); Number of wires on chip(defined exactly from single wire to a hundred thoudsand wires); Nanowire length (from 1 micron to several centimeters); Nanowire materials (single crystalline silicon; most of metals and some alloys; semiconductor metal oxides; single and multi magnetic layers etc); Chip size(1 mm2 to 10000 mm2); Substrate materials(silicon, glass, quartz, plastics);Insulator(SiO2, Si3N4).
Moreover, we can make the nanowire chips in various configurations and materials to meet specific applications. For instance, we can produce field effect transitor nanowire chips (FET) that are integrated with fluidic flow channels, (micro)chambers, (micro)heaters, and temperature sensor etc. Also, the nanowire chips can be bonded to other patterned substrates to form a complex module for gas/liquid handling.
Please feel free to contact us for more information on the nanowire chips.
Nanosens
Berkelkade 11, NL 7201 JE Zutphen,
The Netherlands
Email: T.hien @ nanosens.nl
Phone: +31-575-519-751
Mobile : +31-616-440-373
Fax: +31-848-823-204
Website: http://www.nanosens.nl
