CMOS-compatible Silicon Nitride Waveguide Photonic Building Blocks and Their Application for Optical Coherence Tomography and Other Sensing Applications

In this paper, we report our recent advances in the development of CMOS compatible PECVD silicon nitride waveguide based photonic key building blocks for optical coherence tomography (OCT) in the 850 nm wavelength region and for biosensing applications in the visible domain around 650 nm wavelength. We discuss the design and experimental verification of compact low-loss waveguide bends, broadband couplers with varying power splitting ratios required for PIC based OCT systems, arrayed waveguide gratings for spectral domain OCT, and a monolithically integrated optically pumped organic solid-state laser for low-cost biosensing applications.