Design and Modeling of Semiconductor Terahertz and Infrared Sensing Structures for Protein Characterization

This thesis presents two sensing regimes for the investigation of membrane proteins. One regime is the THz regime, where the research of characteristic fingerprints of membrane proteins is very interesting as they act as drug targets. They exhibit resonances between 200 GHz and 2 THz. For the investigation, a plasmonic sensing platform consisting of highly doped germanium is designed with the Finite Element Method and the properties are analyzed by 3D-full-wave simulations. The sensitivity of the structure is demonstrated. In a further step, this platform is described with lumped circuit elements and an impedance matching approach is given to further improve the sensing properties. The second regime is the infrared regime, where membrane proteins are examined. In this regime, a sensing platform consisting of undoped silicon is modelled with the Finite Element Method and analyzed with 3D-full-wave simulations and compared to measurements. Again, the sensitivity for biomolecules is demonstrated. Both structures presented here are compatible to the standard BiCMOS process and enable low cost production for lab-onchip architectures.