Dopingless Negative Capacitance Ferroelectric TFET for Breast Cancer Cells Detection: Design and Sensitivity Analysis

The current research article reports the electrical detection of breast cancer cell lines (MDA-MB-231, Hs578T, T47D, and MCF-7) by deploying dopingless negative capacitance (NC) ferroelectric (FE) tunnel field-effect transistor (DL-FE-TFET). This device has a double dual metal gate and two nanocavities engraved underneath both gate electrodes for higher detection sensitivity. Our work reports the detection of nontumorigenic cell (MCF-10A) and breast cancer cell lines by combining the NC effect of FE material and dopingless technology synergistically. Here, FE material amplifies the applied gate bias intrinsically. The in-depth electrostatic analysis in terms of surface potential, carrier concentration, energy band diagram, drive current, and electric field has been depicted. Variation of the dielectric constant of these breast cancerous cell lines dictates the detection mechanism in our reported biosensor. The sensitivity has been analyzed in terms of drive current, I_ON/I_OFF ratio, [Formula: see text], and transconductance. The optimized cavity structure demonstrates significantly high drain current sensitivity of the order of 2.88×10⁹ and I_ON/I_OFF ratio sensitivity of the order of 3.2×10⁵ . In addition, the effect of device geometry variation, such as cavity length and FE layer thickness on the drain current sensitivity and I_ON/I_OFF sensitivity, transconductance sensitivity ( S_g ), and threshold voltage sensitivity ( [Formula: see text]) of the device, has also been investigated. This device structure may be deployed for the array-based screening and diagnosis of breast cancer cells lines, with additional benefits including a simpler mechanism of transduction, cost effectiveness, technology compatibility with CMOS process, adjustable electrical response, and reproducibility.