Silicon oxynitride technology for integrated optical solutions in biomedical applications

Silicon oxynitride, a dielectric material with excellent optical properties, is applied for a wide range of integrated optical devices operating at visible or NIR wavelengths. High-quality channel waveguides are reliably fabricated by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition and reactive ion etching following standard lithography. Based on a general, polarization-independent channel waveguide layout various arrayed waveguide gratings were designed, realized and tested for on-chip spectrometers in Raman detection and optical coherence tomography (OCT). With this approach Raman spectra of silicon and cyclohexane test samples are measured. An OCT image of a phantom sample is produced.