Optical biosensor based on a silicon nanowire ridge waveguide for lab on chip applications

Abstract

We propose a novel sensor using a silicon nanowire ridge waveguide (SNRW). This waveguide is comprised of an array of silicon nanowires on an insulator substrate that has the envelope of a ridge waveguide. The SNRW inherently maximizes the overlap between the material-under-test and the incident light wave by introducing voids to the otherwise bulk structure. When a sensing sample is injected, the voids within the SNRW adopt the refractive index of the material-under-test. Hence, the strong contribution of the material-under-test to the overall modal effective index will greatly augment the sensitivity. Additionally, the ridge structure provides a fabrication convenience as it covers the entire substrate, ensuring that the etching process would not damage the substrate. Finite-difference time-domain simulations are conducted and showed that the percentage change in the effective index due to a 1% change in the surrounding environment is more than 170 times the change perceived in an evanescent-detection based bulk silicon ridge waveguide. Moreover, the SNRW proves to be more sensitive than recent other, non-evanescent sensors. In addition, the detection limit for this structure was revealed to be as small as 10−8. A compact bimodal waveguide based on SNRW is designed and tested. It delivers high sensitivity values that offer comparable performance to similar low-index light-guiding sensing configurations; however, our proposed structure has much smaller footprints and allows high dense integration for lab-on-chip applications.