Integrated lasers for biophotonic Lab-on-a-Chip systems in polymer

Lab-on-a-Chip (LoC) systems enable biomedical or chemical testing for point-of-care analysis at the patient´s bedside or in the field. Our work is focused on developing optical LoCs based on polymers by integrating microfluidic channels, optical waveguides, and miniaturized lasers on different platforms. The chips introduced in our work are using optical and fluidic interconnects only. While some of our photonic structures require features with lateral dimensions in the range of 100 nm, the microfluidic channels are more than one order of magnitude above this regime. In order to allow for mass production, the processes for multiscale replication of the chips are optimized for a minimal number of parallel production steps.