Two dimensional polymer-embedded quasi-distributed FBG pressure sensor for biomedical applications.

We report on the development of a flexible 2D optical fiber-based pressure sensing surface suitable for biomedical applications. The sensor comprises of highly-sensitive Fiber Bragg Grating elements embedded in a thin polymer sheet to form a 2x2 cm(2) sensing pad with a minimal thickness of 2.5mm, while it is easily expandable in order to be used as a building block for larger surface sensors. The fabricated pad sensor was combined with a low physical dimension commercially available interrogation unit to enhance the portability features of the complete sensing system. Sensor mechanical properties allow for matching human skin behavior, while its operational performance exhibited a maximum fractional pressure sensitivity of 12 MPa(-1) with a spatial resolution of 1x1cm(2) and demonstrated no hysteresis and real time operation. These attractive operational and mechanical properties meet the requirements of various biomedical applications with respect to human skin pressure measurements, including amputee sockets, shoe sensors, wearable sensors, wheelchair seating-system sensors, hospital-bed monitoring sensors.

Aluminum plasmonic waveguides co-integrated with Si3N4 photonics using CMOS processes.

Co-integrating CMOS plasmonics and photonics became the "sweet spot" to hit in order to combine their benefits and allow for volume manufacturing of plasmo-photonic integrated circuits. Plasmonics can naturally interface photonics with electronics while offering strong mode confinement, enabling in this way on-chip data interconnects when tailored to single-mode waveguides, as well as high-sensitivity biosensors when exposing Surface-Plasmon-Polariton (SPP) modes in aqueous environment. Their synergy with low-loss photonics can tolerate the high plasmonic propagation losses in interconnect applications, offering at the same time a powerful portfolio of passive photonic functions towards avoiding the use of bulk optics for SPP excitation and facilitating compact biosensor setups. The co-integration roadmap has to proceed, however, over the utilization of fully CMOS compatible material platforms and manufacturing processes in order to allow for a practical deployment route. Herein, we demonstrate for the first time Aluminum plasmonic waveguides co-integrated with Si3N4 photonics using CMOS manufacturing processes. We validate the data carrying credentials of CMOS plasmonics with 25 Gb/s data traffic and we confirm successful plasmonic propagation in both air and water-cladded waveguide configurations. This platform can potentially fuel the deployment of co-integrated plasmonic and photonic structures using CMOS processes for biosensing and on-chip interconnect applications.