Monolithic integration of nanopore FETs for ultra-sensitive single molecule label-free detection

CMOS technology has advanced tremendously in the last decades. With improvements in computation power, biosensors have also been developed intensively and have enabled a wide set of applications in life sciences. Among them, nanopore provide unique advantages. 
However, major drawback of traditional nanopore, its extremely low ionic current, making it difficult to read out at a high speed and to massively parallelize. By measuring the response of the transversal current, nanopore FET on the other hand is capable of operating much faster. The nanopore FET concept is currently still in an early stage and very few reports on experimental demonstration of this concept are around.
In this project, I will investigate the latest-developed novel nanopore transistors based on the direct monolithic integration of nanopores with state-of-the art silicon FETs. I will initially adopt experimental characterization of the first generation of novel nanopore transistors, developing a deep understanding of the device properties, and to benchmarking with traditional nanopores. Then, by taking advantage of nanopore FETs, I will develop new schemes and experimentally demonstrate the label-free detection of specific protein molecules with major objectives of high sensitivity, high resolution, fast readout speed or bandwidth, high SNR for better translocation performance for protein molecule, and its potential for large scale parallelization.