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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Readout and data analysis circuits for silicon photonic evanescent field biosensors Panda, Sarthak

Abstract

Silicon Photonic (SiP) evanescent field biosensors exhibit promising potential for developing low-cost medical diagnostics. With modern silicon processes, hundreds of such sensors can be integrated, enabling simultaneous detection and processing of multiple biomarkers. Most state-of-the-art evanescent field sensors use resonance peak tracking to measure biomolecule concentrations. The simplicity of optics in such sensors makes them a perfect candidate for commercial scalability. However, they require complex processing to filter useful information from data distorted by noise and sensor artifacts. Contemporary sensors often rely on discrete computing units, rendering the system expensive and impractical for point-of-care (PoC) applications. Through innovative optics, coherent biosensors have paved the pathway for simplified electronics readout. This being said, achieving comparable performance to peak tracking sensors requires substantial changes in the design of coherent electronic readouts. For the global success of evanescent field sensors, it is imperative to integrate on-chip readouts without compromising performance. This thesis addresses this challenge through two main objectives. Firstly, a hardware-aware on-chip sensor-data processor is implemented for peak tracking evanescent field sensors, ensuring performance parity with discrete processors. Secondly, an electronic readout system is designed to improve the performance of coherent biosensors.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International