GTalk

Among the more attractive non-telecom applications for photonic components on the come for the past few years has been spectroscopy and bio-sensing.  This morning on the Seeking Alpha web site, Larry Dignan highlighted advances in biochips at IBM.   In relation to this, we think it worth noting that the commercialization of biochips and microsensors will likely prove to be a boon to the leading edge of novel photonic devices. 

IBM Biochip: Reference Luc Gervais and Emmanuel Delamarche, Lab Chip, 2009, 9, 3330 (www.rsc.org)

The fundamental needs of portable and rapid analysis leads to the conclusion that photonic systems capable of chip-scale measurement will be part of the commercialization for chemical detection, blood diagnostics and other health oriented sensing applications.  Put another way, if you’re going to broadly adopt lab-on-a-chip capabilities for speed, sensitivity and portability, you’re not going to be using a large separate spectrometer to read the results.  That defeats the purpose. 

While some applications can succeed with electronic sensing, many applications will require chip-scale interfaces for portable spectrometers or perhaps even wafer-level optics for sensing.  In the example cited above, the lab-on-a-chip outputs to a fluorescence spectrometer.   In the future, that fluorescent spectrometer will need to be of a similar scale to the biochip itself. 

This dictates miniaturized photonic solutions.  One example of this is being developed by seed-stage company NanoLambda.  Their ”Spectrum Sensor” chip is a plasmonic device, selecting predefined wavelengths to construct usable spectra for sensing. 

Alternately, systems may utilized fiber optical sensing solutions targeted at specific wavelengths of interest.  Among the photonic companies capable of supplying compact optical channel monitors today are BaySpec and Aegis Lightwave.  BaySpec in particular has made significant progress as a provider of spectrometers.