MIRIPSHE · MID-IR Integrated Photonic Sensor for Health and Environment

MID-IR Integrated Photonic Sensor for Health and Environment

MID-IR Integrated Photonic Sensor for Health and Environment (MIRIPSHE) address the growing demand for advanced functional materials for unparalleled bio-chemical sensing using lightwave technologies for health and environmental monitoring. The MIR band is an excellent detection window for most biochemical elements such as Amides, Lipids, Nitriles and Carbon dioxide as the absorption fingerprints of these molecules lies in the 2-10 µm wavelength range. Integrated Photonics platform can play a major role in the MIR on-chip chemical and biological sensing with high sensitivity.Silicon is the widely used material platform for realising electronic integrated devices (electronic Cs) using the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)manufacturing technique. The progress of current MIR platforms to a complete lab-on-chip system is limited due to their incompatibility to monolithically integrate with a CMOS platform. MIRIPSHE strives to ingeniously develop a CMOS-compatible MIR optical sensor platform by functionalizing rare earth enriched chalcogenide glasses into the silicon substrate using the novel ultrafast laser plasma implantation (ULPI) technique developed at the University of Leeds (UNIVLEEDS). The sensing scheme relies on the MIR fluorescent emission of rare earth elements and their selective absorption characteristics corresponding to the molecular composition of the analytes. The materials platform developed in MIRIPSHE would accelerate the monolithic integration of MIR photonic circuitries with the present state of the art CMOS systems. This manufacturing compatible process produced under MIRIPSHE will be easily adopted by the CMOS industries and enable the low-cost production of MIR sensors for health and environmental monitoring thereby helping society and boosting the economy. These novel materials will appeal to multi-disciplinary researchers engaged in biophotonics, medical devices and smart system development, for creating fast, precise and customer-friendly devices for sensing and diagnosis. Furthermore, the material engineering and integration process would unlock a creative and high impact research area, prospering beyond the optical interconnect technology and succeeding in the seamless integration of multiple functions (mechanical, electrical, acoustic and imaging) on a single chip, leading to the invention of more sophisticated systems that have ever been seen before.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union