Micro optical sensors based on avalanching silicon light-emitting devices monolithically integrated on chips

By Kaikai Xu, Yanxu Chen, T. Okhai, L. Snyman. Optical Materials Express, 2019

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Silicon avalanche light-emitting devices (Si Av LEDs) offer various possibilities for realizing micro- and even nano- optical biosensors directly on chip. The light-emitting devices (LEDs) operate in the wavelength range of about 450-850nm, and their optical power emitted is of the order of a few hundreds of nW/µm2. These LEDs could be fabricated in micro- and nano- dimensions by using modern semiconductor fabrication processing technologies through the mainstream of silicon material. Through a series of experiments, the dispersion phenomena in the Si Av LED are observed. Also, its light emission point was proved to locate at about one micron just below the silicon-silicon oxide interface. Subsequently, a micro-fluidic channel sensor was designed by using the dispersion characteristics owned by the Si Av LED. The analytes flowing through a micro-fluidic channel could be studied by their specific transmittance and absorption spectra. Moreover, simulations verify that a novel designed waveguide-based sensor could be fabricated on chip between the Si optical source and the Si P-I-N detector.

Subfields: Bioengineering, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0be0dee5f808b71627cc28042eb407801416950