Dr. Konstantinos Misiakos Dr. Konstantinos Misiakos received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, 1978, his M.Sc. from Clemson University, Clemson, USA in 1984, and his Ph.D. from the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA in 1987. He served as a visiting assistant professor in Electrical Engineering at the University of Florida from August 1987 until May 1989. Since 1989 he is with the Institute of Microelectronics, NCSR “Demokritos”, where he now holds the position of Director of Research. His research interests include optical biosensors, monolithic silicon optocouplers for biosensing, solar cells and radiation detectors. He is the author of 85 publications in international journals, 45 publications in international conferences, three book chapters and holds three international patents on biosensors. He coordinated three European projects: “BOEMIS” (1997-2000), “BIOMIC” (2001-2004) and “NEMOSLAB” (2006-2009), all in biosensors.
Photonic probing of developing adlayers in ongoing biomolecular reactions is preferable to other types of biosensing because of the galvanic isolation of the transducer from the excitation and detection components and the optical frequency regime of operation. Guided optics interferometry is way more sensitive compared to the free space one since in the sensing waveguide the photons probe the biomolecular adlayer many times compared to two or one as the case is in white light reflectance spectroscopy, standard ellipsometry or SPR.
The above mentioned sensitivity performance and parasitic immunity advantages make waveguide based interference devices ideals for point of need testing. Such an application requires the integration of light sources along with the transducer to reduce volume, power dissipation and costly optical alignment of external sources. In this sense, an integrated interferometric chip is presented with monolithically integrated light emitting diodes on silicon. The monomodal silicon nitride waveguides are patterned to form Mach-Zehnder interferometers while the observable is the spectral shifts at the output.