Nanowires for biomolecule detection

Abstract

There is an increasing demand for portable sensor systems in health care that enable on-site analyses e.g. at local medicare centers, in ambulances or even at home. Semiconductor nanowires offer a highly sensitive and label free detection principle for biochemical applications that makes it possible to scale down the size of complete analysis systems. In particular silicon nanowires, making use of current CMOS technology, offer multiple parallel detection of a large number of different biomolecules such as proteins or DNA strands.