On-chip resonance peak extraction in evanescent field silicon photonic biosensors

Abstract

Micro ring resonators (MRR) based evanescent field biosensors have shown excellent potential in medical diagnostics due to their performance, scalability, and ability to integrate multiple sensors in a small area to detect various biomarkers simultaneously. The quest to improve the performance and feature size of such sensors has led to the development of cutting-edge photonic integrated circuits (PIC). However, chip-scale implementation of readout and data analysis still needs to be addressed adequately. State-of-the-art evanescent field biosensors rely on off-chip data processing for better results, making the system bulky and ill-suited for point-of-care (PoC) and point-of-use (PoU) applications. In this work, we implement an MRR biosensor in a silicon photonic (SiP) SOI process and demonstrate resonance peak extraction with its measurement data using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) simulated in a 16nm FinFET process with performance similar to external processors.