[nanoPost] Nanosensors

Company The Netherlands

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.
    
 

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.