Lipid bilayers on silicon may become the matrix of future bioelectronic devices if the junction is sufficiently insulating. We touched the open gate of a field-effect transistor with a preformed giant lipid vesicle and bound the membrane by means of polyelectrolyte interaction. The sheet resistance along the junction was 100 GOhm and the membrane resistance was above 100 GOhm at a contact area of 1000 µm. The bilayer was fluid and followed smoothly the surface profile of the chip. The compound lipid-silicon structure is suitable to couple semiconductor and electroactive proteins.
Fig. 2. Giant lipid vesicles on a silicon chip. Scale bars 10 µm. (a) Cross section of a fluorescent vesicle on a chip with transistors obtained by laser scanning microscopy. The intensity of the attached membrane is inhomogeneous due to the variable thickness of silicon dioxide. (b) Micrograph of a vesicle on an array of transistors with a lattice constant 3.6 µm. The picture is aligned with a. The insert shows the geometry of source (S), drain (D), local field oxide (F) and gate (G). The size of the gate is 2 µm x 1.8 µm.
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