Integrated Angle-Insensitive Nanoplasmonic Filters for Ultraminiaturized Fluorescence Microarray in a 65 nm Digital CMOS Process

Abstract

In this work, we demonstrate for the first time massively parallelizable nanoplasmonic structures and integration of electronics in the same substrate in CMOS. We adopt the same “fabless” approach in today’s semiconductor industry with absolutely “no change” of either fabrication or processing and show that copper interconnects in an industry standard digital CMOS process (65 nm node) can be exploited to allow subwavelength optical field processing in a massively scalable fashion. We demonstrate this in the context of eliminating all external optics and enabling the first optics-free fully integrated CMOS fluorescence-based biosensor array. The system has massively multiplexed biomolecular sensing capability for DNAs with surface sensitivity comparable to commercial fluorescence readers. The angle and scattering insensitive nature of the filter, relying on coupled surface-plasmon polariton modes, allows us to eliminate all external optics and miniaturize the entire 96-sensor array system (including a LED ...