High-sensitivity ion detection at low voltages with current-driven organic electrochemical transistors

Matteo Ghittorelli, Leona Lingstedt, Paolo Romele, N. Irina Crăciun, Zsolt Miklós Kovács-Vajna, Paul W. M. Blom and Fabrizio Torricelli ()
Additional contact information
Matteo Ghittorelli: University of Brescia
Leona Lingstedt: Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
Paolo Romele: University of Brescia
N. Irina Crăciun: Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
Zsolt Miklós Kovács-Vajna: University of Brescia
Paul W. M. Blom: Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
Fabrizio Torricelli: University of Brescia

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Ions dissolved in aqueous media play a fundamental role in plants, animals, and humans. Therefore, the in situ quantification of the ion concentration in aqueous media is gathering relevant interest in several fields including biomedical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, healthcare products, water and food test and control, agriculture industry and security. The fundamental limitation of the state-of-art transistor-based approaches is the intrinsic trade-off between sensitivity, ion concentration range and operating voltage. Here we show a current-driven configuration based on organic electrochemical transistors that overcomes this fundamental limit. The measured ion sensitivity exceeds by one order of magnitude the Nernst limit at an operating voltage of few hundred millivolts. The ion sensitivity normalized to the supply voltage is larger than 1200 mV V−1 dec−1, which is the largest value ever reported for ion-sensitive transistors. The proposed approach is general and can be extended to any transistor technology, thus opening opportunities for high-performance bioelectronics.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03932-3 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-03932-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03932-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().