Biophotonic sensors with integrated SiN-organic hybrid (SiNOH) lasers for point-of-care diagnostics.

Early and efficient disease diagnosis with low-cost point-of-care devices is gaining importance for personalized medicine and public health protection. Within this context, waveguide-(WG)-based optical biosensors on the silicon-nitride (SiN) platform represent a particularly promising option, offering highly sensitive detection of indicative biomarkers in multiplexed sensor arrays operated by light in the visible-wavelength range. However, while passive SiN-based photonic circuits lend themselves to highly scalable mass production, the integration of low-cost light sources remains a challenge.

Surface sensing with integrated optical waveguides: a design guideline.

Waveguide-based biochemical sensors exploit detection of target molecules that bind specifically to a functionalized waveguide surface. For optimum sensitivity, the waveguide should be designed to mediate maximum influence of the surface layer on the effective refractive index of the guided mode. In this paper, we define a surface sensitivity metric which quantifies this impact and which allows to broadly compare different waveguide types and integration platforms.