Spectroscopy-on-chip applications of silicon photonics

In recent years silicon photonics has become a mature technology enabling the integration of a variety of optical and optoelectronic functions by means of advanced CMOS technology. While most efforts in this field have gone to telecom and datacom/interconnect applications, there is a rapidly growing interest in using the same technology for sensing applications, ranging from refractive index sensing to spectroscopic sensing. In this paper the prospect of silicon photonics for absorption, fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy on-a-chip will be discussed. To allow spectroscopy in the visible and near infrared the silicon photonics platform is extended with silicon nitride waveguides