Optofluidic microchip for biomedical and chemical sensing

Over the past decade, interdisciplinary researchers from biology, chemistry, and engineering have put much effort into the development of tiny, portable chips suitable for the rapid and early detection of pathogens, infectious diseases, or biological weapons in a sample of a person’s blood. These microchips could bring the capabilities of an entire medical laboratory to the places they are most desirable ‒ the developing world, the battlefield, and the home ‒ and where they could quickly detect Escherichia coli, anthrax, or the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. This dissertation describes the integration of optoelectronics and micro-fluidics, the combination of which is known as optofluidics, for the creation of powerful chemical and biomedical diagnostic microchips. The design and fabri-cation of system components such as vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, pho-todetectors, and fluorescence filters are explored, and their integrations into a compact optofluidic microchip are presented. Fluorescence measurements as a means to characterize the performance of the proposed optofluidic microchip are carried out. Challenges such as high-efficiency excitation and minimization of optical and electrical cross-talk, as well as issues about sealing and isolation be-tween fluidic and optoelectronic components are addressed, and solutions are pre-sented