Fabrication and characterization of boron doped diamond microelectrode arrays of varied geometry

Boron doped diamond (BDD) is a well-known electrode material that exhibits an excellent electrochemical potential window with very low background current. With this, microelectrodes and microelectrode arrays (MEAs) have been found to even further lower background currents without compromising sensitivity. As such, BDD MEAs are excellent electrode materials for a variety of electroanalytical applications, capable of multi-mode detection. We fabricated BDD MEAs adapting traditional semiconductor microfabrication processes; the resulting MEAs were patterned in different geometries to find an optimum electrochemical response, depending on the application. This is demonstrated using 4 different MEA geometries of different size and spacing using cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), where the charge transfer resistance (R_ct) increases as the electrodes are farther spaced from one another. Excellent sigmoidal voltammogram shape in CV was obtained for each BDD MEA geometry. BDD MEAs spaced farther from one another were found to give better resolution from the background in fast scan cyclic voltammetric measurements of dopamine due to the decrease in the double layer capacitance (C_dl) as verified with EIS. This work furthers the understanding of BDD MEAs and their pertinence to sensitive electroanalytical techniques.