Glucose plays a key factor in human metabolism processes and abnormal glucose levels in blood or body fluids are directly related to diabetes. To continuous glucose monitoring, should be considered non-invasive method using body fluids (such as tear, ...
Glucose plays a key factor in human metabolism processes and abnormal glucose levels in blood or body fluids are directly related to diabetes. To continuous glucose monitoring, should be considered non-invasive method using body fluids (such as tear, sweat, urine, saliva, etc.), instead of invasive method which induced painful to extract the blood. This requires a high sensitivity under low glucose concentration, because the glucose concentration in body fluids are much lower than blood. The oxide thin film transistor (oxide-TFT) based glucose sensor can be one of the diverse candidates to obtain high sensitivity. Because oxide-TFTs have a lot of advantages such as high sensitivity, good chemical resistance, rapid electrical detection, and easy fabrication process and so on. The previous studies showed the high sensitive performance of sensor based on electrical analysis, but more efforts are needed in order to increase the field effect mobility, improve the uniformity of thin films, immobilization of bio-receptors, and interface compatibility of oxide thin film and bio-receptors. Also, they comprehensively did not show the any electronic structure variation.
For this reason, we tried to fabricate of indium oxide (InO), zinc (Zn) doped indium oxide (IZO), and gallium (Ga) doped indium oxide (IGO) -TFTs easily using the co-sputtering system, and applied to glucose sensor. and then evaluated the detection characteristics according to the glucose concentration in 1 x phosphate buffered saline (1 x PBS) solution. Also, their surfaces were modified through surface functionalization method to improve detection characteristics according to glucose concentration. The detection performances of glucose were improved through the Zn, Ga doping, and the surface functionalization process. The effects of Zn and Ga doping, respectively as well as surface modification on the changes of surface states, electronic structure, chemical bonding states, and band alignments were systematically examined. The mechanism of glucose detection properties was described through changes of electrical properties and physical analysis.