While silicon photonic resonant cavities have been widely investigated for biosensing applications, enhancing their sensitivity and detection limit continues to be an area of active research. Here, we describe how to engineer the effective refractive index and mode profile of a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguide using sub-wavelength gratings (SWG) and report on its observed performance as a biosensor. We designed a 30 μm diameter SWG ring resonator and fabricated it using Ebeam lithography. Its characterization resulted in a quality factor, Q, of 7 · 10³, bulk sensitivity Sb = 490 nm/RIU, and system limit of detection sLoD = 2 · 10^-6 RIU. Finally we employ a model biological sandwich assay to demonstrate its utility for biosensing applications.

Standard silicon photonic strip waveguides offer a high intrinsic refractive index contrast; this permits strong light confinement, leading to compact bends, which in turn facilitates the fabrication of devices with small footprints. Sub-wavelength grating (SWG) based waveguides can allow the fabrication of low loss devices with specific, engineered optical properties. The combination of SWG waveguides with optical micro-resonators can offer the possibility of achieving resonators with properties different from the traditional SOI rings. One important property that SWG rings can offer is decreased light confinement in the waveguide core; this improves the resonator's sensitivity to changes in the cladding refractive index, making the rings ideal for refractive index sensing applications. In this paper, we present the design and experimental characterization of SWG based rings realized on SOI chips without upper cladding (permitting their use as sensors). The fabricated rings offer quality factors in the range of ~1k-6k, depending on SWG parameters. Based on the comparison of experimental and simulated data we expect sensitivities exceeding 383 nm/RIU in water and 270 nm/RIU in air, showing excellent potential for use in sensing applications.

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In this paper we demonstrate silicon on insulator (SOI) sub-wavelength grating (SWG) optical components for integrated optics and sensing. Light propagation in SWG devices is studied and realized with no cladding on top of the waveguide. In particular, we focused on SWG bends, tapers and directional couplers, all realized with compatible geometries in order to be used as building blocks for more complex integrated optics devices (interferometers, switches, resonators, etc.). Fabricated SWG tapers for TE and TM polarizations are described; they allow for connecting SWG devices to regular strip waveguides with loss lower than 1 dB per taper. Our SWG directional coupler presents a very compact design and a negligible wavelength dependence of its crossover length (and as a consequence of its coupling coefficient, κ), over a 40 nm bandwidth. This wavelength flatten response represents a bandwidth enhancement with respect to standard directional couplers (made using strip or rib waveguides), in particular for the TE mode. SWG bends are demonstrated, their loss dependence on radius is analyzed, and fabricated bends have a loss in the range 0.8-1.6 dB per 90 degrees bend. Simulated and measured results show promise for large-scale fabrication of complex optical devices and high sensitivity sensors based on SWG waveguides with engineered optical properties, tailored to specific applications.

We determine the propagation loss for E-Beam Lithography fabricated sub-wavelength grating (SWG) waveguides at 1550 nm for various duty cycles.

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