Thermal independent Silicon-Nitride slot waveguide biosensor with high sensitivity

Abstract

As the sensitivity and detection limit of photonic refractive index (RI) biosensor increases, the temperature dependence becomes a major challenge. In this paper, we present a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) biosensor based on silicon nitride slot waveguides. The biosensor is designed for minimal temperature dependence without compromising the performance in terms of sensitivity and detection limit. With air cladding, the measured surface sensitivity and detection limit of MZI biosensor reach 7.16 nm/(ng mm(-2)) and 1.30 (pg mm(-2)), while achieving a low temperature dependence is 5.0 pm/° C. With water cladding, the measured bulk sensitivity and detection limit reach 1730(2π)/RIU and 1.29 × 10(-5) RIU respectively. By utilizing Vernier effect through cascaded MZI structures, the measured sensitivity enhancement factor is 8.38, which results in a surface detection limit of 0.155 (pg mm(-2)).

Fabrication and characterization of on-chip silicon nitride microdisk integrated with colloidal quantum dots

“…Various applications, such as optomechanics [6], nonlinear optics [7] and on-chip biosensing [8,9] have SiN photonic building blocks. Because of its dielectric nature however it is hard to realize active devices within the SiN platform and therefore efforts to bring optoelectronic functionality into the currently passive-only SiN platforms are of high scientific and technological interest.…”

A rapid MZI-IDA sensor system for EGFR mutation testing in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)

“…The sensor chip was fabricated using standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) processes as described in previous papers (Liu et al, 2013;Tu et al, 2012). Briefly, the slot waveguides, strip waveguides and gratings were patterned on commercially available 200 mm silicon wafer with 400 nm-thick Si 3 N 4 layer and 3 μm-thick oxide layer by 248 nm deep UV lithography and etched by reactive ion etching (RIE) process, followed by the plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) of 2 μm SiO 2 as a top cladding layer.…”

High performance Si<inf>3</inf>N<inf>4</inf> waveguide devices platform

“…Thermal independence is realized with LlLlL=0.34 which results in the thermal-optical coefficient ratio r= (8nef/slo!8T)/ (8nefLs,n/8T) ;::; 0.67 according to ref [6]. The measured spectrum of Si3N4 one-ring-two-bus optcial filter.…”