Fully Integrated Optical Spectrometer in Visible and Near-IR in CMOS

Lingyu Hong, Kaushik Sengupta

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

27 Scopus citations

Abstract

Optical spectrometry in the visible and near-infrared range has a wide range of applications in healthcare, sensing, imaging, and diagnostics. This paper presents the first fully integrated optical spectrometer in standard bulk CMOS process without custom fabrication, postprocessing, or any external optical passive structure such as lenses, gratings, collimators, or mirrors. The architecture exploits metal interconnect layers available in CMOS processes with subwavelength feature sizes to guide, manipulate, control, diffract light, integrated photodetector, and read-out circuitry to detect dispersed light, and then back-end signal processing for robust spectral estimation. The chip, realized in bulk 65-nm low power-CMOS process, measures 0.64 mm $\times$ 0.56 mm in active area, and achieves 1.4 nm in peak detection accuracy for continuous wave excitations between 500 and 830 nm. This paper demonstrates the ability to use these metal-optic nanostructures to miniaturize complex optical instrumentation into a new class of optics-free CMOS-based systems-on-chip in the visible and near-IR for various sensing and imaging applications.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number8241906
Pages (from-to)1176-1191
Number of pages16
JournalIEEE transactions on biomedical circuits and systems
Volume11
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2017

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Biomedical Engineering

Keywords

  • CMOS
  • dispersion
  • fluorescence
  • gratings
  • metal-optics
  • nano-optics
  • photodetecton
  • spectrometry
  • waveguides

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Fully Integrated Optical Spectrometer in Visible and Near-IR in CMOS'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this