Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

Lab-on-a-chip technologies have seen great advances and development over the past few decades in addressing applications such as biochemical analysis, pharmaceutical development, and point-of-care diagnostics. Miniaturization of biochemical operations performed on lab-on-a-chip platforms benefit from reduced sample, reagent and waste volumes as well as increased parallelization and automation. This enables more cost-effective operations along with higher throughput and sensitivity for faster and more efficient analysis and detection.

The research presented in this dissertation...

Heterogeneous integration of optical integrated components promises to bridge the gap in functionality of different material platforms currently in use. For example, high performance gain materials such as indium phosphide can now be integrated with reliable silicon photonic circuits to create sophisticated tunable light sources. We propose a multi-chip heterogeneous integration platform using edge coupling to couple light in-between chips and evanescent coupling to couple light to optical fibers. The proposed optoelectronic packaging scheme enables applications for low power, large...

The ability to quickly perform large numbers of chemical and biological reactions in parallel using low reagent volumes is a field well addressed by droplet-based digital microfluidics. Compared to continuous flow-based techniques, digital microfluidics offers the added advantages such as individual sample addressing and reagent isolation. We are developing a Light- Actuated Digital Microfluidics device (also known as optoelectrowetting) that optically manipulates nano- to micro-liter scale aqueous droplets on the device surface. The device possesses many advantages including ease of...