Amorphous silicon based photodetectors for biosensing

Thin film photodiodes open interesting possibilities for enhancing well known optical detection methods in biosensing [1,2]. This contribution focuses on the development of a portable point-of-care (POCT) sensor system based on the direct optical and label-free detection of proteins by Reflectometric Interference Spectroscopy (RIfS) [3]. But more generally, the integration of amophous silicon (a-Si) based photodiodes into microfluidic sample handling environments enables miniaturization and parallelization of several optical techniques for biosensing, e.g. fluorescence labelling for DNA detection [4], chemiluminescence [5], or optical absorption [6] of appropriately labelled proteins.