Abstract
Heavy metals are a risk to humans if they get accumulated in your body. Mercury is an extremely dangerous one, if inhaled it directly targets the brain, whereas mercuric salts mainly affects the kidney. Monitoring concentration of mercury in drinking water, tap water and juices or food we intake are thus really important. There are several techniques in place in order to check the concentration of mercury but most of them are either laboratory based and expensive, some are inconvenient as well. Since there is an increasing case of mercury related poisoning it becomes necessary to monitor the mercury level. The extended gate ISMFET sensor enables easy and economical testing and provides a reliable output on the amount of mercury in that particular test material in a really short period of time. This sensor deciphers a sensing methodology which is highly selective to the target ion and offers a low affinity to other interfering ions. By combining ion-selective membrane with an extended gate device connected to a FET, and introducing the electric double layer structure with an extremely small gap distance enables us to attain sensitivity higher than the Nernst behaviour, and also improves the detection limit to 10-13 M which is much better than the benchtop instruments. We have also achieved a dynamic range from 10-13 M to 10-5 M. the sensor can also be used for real time testing in different water based systems such as tap water, drinking water, industrial waste water, medicines, food and beverages. Along with the advantages of small size, portable, less expensive and easy to fabricate this can be coined as a reliable and user friendly mercury sensor.