Design of an Extreme Low Cutoff Frequency Highpass Frontend for CMOS ISFET via Direct Tunneling Principle

In this work, ISFET frontends utilising the direct tunneling current to eliminate trapped charge are proposed. The principle has been investigated and verified via silicon-imitated ISFET first, where silicon capacitors are used to imitate the passivation ones. Because the dominant tunneling components depend on the potential difference between Gate and Drain terminals, a source-follower structure could itself perform a highpass filter with time constant at 10-100 seconds level. Additionally, a time-constant regulation mechanism is presented by feeding the output signal back to the drain terminal of ISFETs, achieving a regulation factor over 50, namely from 4.7 seconds to 243.4 seconds in our implementation. Afterwards in chemical test, proposed ISFETs have been verified in terms of unit passivation capacitance, linearity, noise and sensitivity for ISFETs with 3 different top metal areas. It is found that approximately 30.12 mV/pH sensitivity can be achieved, and for the first time we managed to derive the relation between chemical flicker noise and sensing metal area.