Study of surface morphology and refractive index of dielectric and metallic films used for the fabrication of monolithically integrated surface plasmon resonance biosensing devices
- 作者：Alvaro Jimenez ; Dominic Lepage ; Jacques Beauvais ; Jan J. Dubowski ; jan.j.dubowski@usherbrooke.ca ;
- 关键词：Gold thin films ; Dielectric thin films ; Surface plasmon resonance integrated device ; Plasmonic device fabrication ; Biosensing
- 刊名：Microelectronic Engineering
- 出版年：2012
- 期刊代码：91_01679317
- 类别：cp
- 出版时间：May, 2012
- 卷：93
- 期：Complete
- 页码：91-94
- 文件大小：559 K
摘要
Integration in a single chip using localized optical phenomena is one of the possible approaches to attain the accuracy, portability and affordability required for future biosensing devices. We address this problem by investigating a grating-coupled quantum well (QW) surface plasmon resonance (SPR) device that comprises a monolithically integrated source of light and a bio-sensitive surface. The successful operation of such a device requires, in addition to the optimization of its architecture, the use of high quality thin films with smooth surface morphology. Here, we present the results of studying a variety of dielectric and Au films intended for the fabrication of QW-SPR devices. For dielectrics, we found that SiO2 films obtained by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition have the best surface morphology and optical properties appropriate for our device. The films of Au fabricated with deposition rates exceeding 0.3 nm/s exhibited relatively smooth surface morphology, however the presence of surface micro-inclusions reduced the attractiveness of such films. To avoid sample overheating that occurs at extremely slow deposition rates, we optimized the fabrication of Au films at 0.05 and 0.2 nm/s.