Miniaturized computational spectrometer based on two-photon absorption

On-chip spectrometers hold significant promise in the development of laboratory-on-a-chip applications. However, the spectrometers usually require extra on-chip or off-chip photodetectors (PDs) to sense optical signals, resulting in increased footprints and costs. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a fully on-chip spectrometer based on two-photon absorption (TPA) in a simple micro-ring resonator (MRR) configuration. While TPA is a commonly undesired phenomenon in conventional silicon devices due to its attached absorption losses and nonlinearity, we exploit it as a powerful and efficient tool for encoding spectral information, instead of using additional PDs. The input spectrum can be reconstructed from the sensed TPA current. Our proposed spectrometer achieves a bandwidth of 10 nm with a resolution of 0.4 nm while occupying a small footprint of only 16×16µm2, and the bandwidth can be further improved through several cascaded MRRs. This advancement could enable forward fully integrated and miniaturized spectrometers with low cost, which holds far-reaching applications in in situ biochemical analysis, remote sensing, and intelligent healthcare.