High Performance Fully Inkjet-Printed Organic Electrochemical Transistor (OECT) Biosensor

Abstract

High throughput, high sensitivity, and scalability point-of-care biosensors have the potential to significantly improve diagnosis and disease monitoring. Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) are a powerful platform for point-of-care biosensing given their sensitivity and performance. Unfortunately, this is seldom achieved with novel and cost-effective fabrication methods. In this work, we built high-performance OECTs using state-of-the-art inkjet printing technology a, scalable, highly reproducible, and low-cost fabrication process. The design utilizes unique high conductivity PEDOT: PSS formulations driving higher ion-to-electron conversion, and volumetric capacitance reaching a value of 18.524 F cm−3. The design included a high ratio of channel cross-sectional area to length reaching a maximum corresponding transconductance (gm) value of 15.2 mS, an order of magnitude improvement on published work. The design was also tested with Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA) protein and showed a limit of detection on the order of 1 pM of BSA. This work shows the potential of inkjet printing for fabricating low-cost, high-performance OECT-based point-of-care biosensors.