Products

Nanoproducts (NEMS)

Nanosens develops and produces various nanostructures for sensor technology, including nanowires of various materials, single nanopore membrane, nanoelectrodes, nanogaps, nanoresonators and nanocantilevers etc. All these structures with the dimensions of the active part down to a few nanometers can be used to build up many kinds of smart and powerful nanosensors as reported recently by researchers around the world.

The main difference is that we combine various “ high tech equipment” together with “ our proprietary developed processes” to make above structures or devices inexpensive. Thus we can provide our customers nanostructures with a high added value at low-cost for further development and incorporation in their own sensors.

Art draw shows a layout of the nanowires on the silicon chip

Nanowire chips ready for application (NWCs)

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 least ca. 1000 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. V ery 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.

Recently, using the very latest of semiconductor techniques, Nanosens is are 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. We call this chip “nanowire chips, ready for application”. The product displayed on this webpage (see Table 1) is the first product in what will be a much wider family of nanowire products of different wire sizes, wire densities, and wire materials . Please feel free to contact us for more information on this product.

Nanowires of a several centimeter length on an insulating SiO2 layer on the silicon: (A) 80-nm width gold;	Nanowires of a several centimeter length on an insulating SiO2 layer on the silicon: (B) 20-nm width platinum.	A several centimeter length, 70-nm width palladium (Pd) nanowires

Table 1: Specifications of our available nanowire chips

Items	Specifications
Nanowire width	50 ± 10 nm
Nanowire thickness	40 ± 5 nm
Number of wires on chip	500 and 1000
Nanowire length	L=1000 microns
Nanowire area width	W=3000 microns
Materials	Au, Pt, Pd, Cu, Ag
Materials on request	Single crystalline silicon Most of metals and some alloys… Semiconductor metal oxides: ZnO, SnO2… Single and multi magnetic layers: NiFe, Co…
Electrode materials	300 nm Pt
Electrode size	3.5 x 1 mm
Substrate material	Insulator of 900 nm SiO2 on <100> silicon
Substrate material on request	Glass, Quartz, some plastics
Chip sizes	A=5 x B=5 x H=0.55 mm

Most of the metal nanowires have polycrystalline structures with a very fine grain size of a few nm.
5 nm of Cr is used to improve the adhesion of the wires to the silicon chip.

At this moment we have developed and made the nanowire chips with the above specifications, however 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.

The following variations can be made for the nanowire chips :

The nanowire width: down to 20 nm.
The nanowire thickness: as thin as 10 nm.
The nanowire length: from 2 microns to several mm.
Number of nanowire per chip: from singe wire up to several thousands.
The possible materials: most of the metal like Cu, Ni, Co, Bi, Ta, Ti etc; several alloys like PdAg, PdAu, PdCu, AuAg, NiFe etc; multi-metal layers, semiconducting oxides like ZnO, SnO2, In2O3; superconductors, and PZT. Especially, we can produce single crystalline silicon nanowires.
The nanowire chip configuration: from the above simple design to complex constructions like FET and Nanowire array in a microhotplate.
The chip size: from 1 to 10000 mm2.
The substrate materials: glass, quartz, even some plastics.

Microproducts (MEMS)

The infomation of our microproducts is coming soon, please visit later.

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