Fabrication of a low power CMOS-compatible ZnO nanocomb-based gas sensor

In this paper, a novel CMOS-compatible ZnO nanocomb-based gas sensor is presented. Compared with previously reported implementations, the proposed ZnO nanocombs feature multiple conducting channels and much larger effective sensing area, both of which result in dramatically improved sensitivity (6.54 for 250 ppm CO), response time (3.4 min) and recovery time (0.24 min). In addition, by operating the gas sensor at room temperature, additional power-hungry heating components inevitable in traditional implementations are completely removed. This not only leads to low power consumption, but also avoids the high-temperature-caused reliability degradation when integrated with CMOS circuitry.