Surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology: towards miniaturized and high-performance biosensors

Fast detection of extremely small sample quantities is one of the primary goals of the biosensor research community. The idea is to develop easy-to-use microsystems that can detect ultra-low concentrations of different analytes in body fluids (e.g., molecular biomarkers for diseases) without analyte-labelling (label- free). However, most of the available technology (mainly based on optics) is expensive, complex and hard to miniaturize. Among all the electrical readout based sensors, surface acoustic wave- (SAW-) based devices have attracted great interest for their characteristics of being wirelessly addressable and fabricated by using well-established CMOS planar techniques. Sensors based on electrical readout are generally more compact but have the drawback of being less sensitive than those based on optical detection. We overcame this limitation by increasing the sensor working frequencies and hence surface sensitivity. High performance SAW based biosensors operating from 50 MHz to 1 GHz will be presented and discussed, highlighting the versatility and reliability of SAW technology.

Fabio Taddei (9038) - fabio.taddei@nano.cnr.it
Stefan Heun (9472) - stefan.heun@nano.cnr.it