Label-free Evanescent Field Biosensors Using Silicon Photonics Technology

Photonics is playing an increasingly important role in the field of medical diagnostics, genomics and drug discovery. With the advances in molecular biology which gives insight to the processes underlying diseases and drug response, there is a need for new biological sensors to rapidly detect and quantify these processes. Sensing of biological events using planar waveguide evanescent field (EVF) detection offers label–free, high sensitivity, and real time monitoring [1]–[4]. This is a competing technology with the commercially pervasive SPR (surface plasmon resonance) method, but with the advantage of portability and low cost.