Optimization and Fabrication of Highly Sensitive Metamaterial Sensor Using Dividing Rectangles Based Kriging Surrogate Model

Highly sensitive metamaterial (MM) sensor is proposed, optimized, and fabricated for biomedical applications. The full vectorial finite element method (FVFEM) is used to calculate the absorption spectrum through the MM design. In order to achieve high sensor sensitivity, a dividing rectangles optimization technique is successfully integrated with a Kriging surrogate model and the FVFEM. The reported design is based on a circular copper layer etched with four squares over an FR-4 dielectric substrate. This results in a high absorption peak of 0.999 with a high quality factor of 20.84–36.508. Additionally, the resonance frequency is sensitive to the analyte refractive index (RI) with a high sensitivity of 5.7 GHz/RIU and a high quality factor of 23.1 within the RI range from 1.33 to 1.34. Further, the potential of using the suggested design as a biosensor for cancer detection is demonstrated with an average sensitivity of 5.614 GHz/RIU. The proposed biosensor has high linear performance through the RI range of the studied breast, basal, cervical, Jurkat, PC12, and MCF-7 cells. The reported design is also fabricated and characterized with a good match between simulated and measured results. Therefore, the introduced algorithm could be used efficiently for the optimization and design of MM biosensors.