Silicon photonic wire devices for biosensing and communications

We review our work on silicon wire devices designed for evanescent field sensor arrays and ultra-compact dense optical comb filters, both taking advantage of a spiral cavity resonator design. Two sensor array configurations are described, and monitoring of biomolecular binding is demonstrated with a detection limit of 0.3 pg/mm2. On-chip temperature drift compensation is achieved by using a reference resonator. A novel grating coupler using subwavelength structures facilitates the coupling of light between the optical fiber and waveguide chips.