Fabrication and Electrochemical Characterization of Micro- and Nanoelectrode Arrays for Sensor Applications

This paper describes the fabrication of microelectrode arrays, with two different geometries: disc (Designs d1 and d2) and band (Designs b1, b2 and b3) using three critical dimensions (100 nm, 1 μm and 10 μm) leading to 5 different designs, fabricated by the combination of UV photolithographic and e-beam lithographic techniques. Three silicon nitride layer thicknesses (200, 300 and 500 nm) were chosen to determine an optimized transducer design and fabrication process. Cyclic voltammetry characterisation using a simple redox probe ion, ferreocenecarboxylic acid in phosphate buffered saline electrolyte solution, demonstrated steady-state voltammetric curves for d1, d2, b1 and b2. A good agreement between experimental and theoretical data is found for devices d1, d2, b1 and b2. The experimental current for b3, on the other hand, is much lower compared to the calculated one- perhaps due to the overlapping of the diffusion layers of neighbouring microelectrodes in the array.