ABSTRACT
Many chemical and biological compounds have characteristic florescence in the ultraviolet (UV). This fluorescence signature can be used as a fingerprint to identify unknown agents for biosensing applications. III-Nitrides are a family of wide band-gap III–V semiconductor materials that can be tuned to span the entire UV and visible region. By studying the physics, material growth, and fabrication of III-nitride devices it is possible to realize high-performance UV light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and photodetectors for florescence-based spectroscopy. By combining them together at the chip-level, a low-cost portable biosensing system can be developed. One of the most important applications of such a system is bioagent detection. There are currently two major methods of detecting biological agents: wet chemical and fluorescence based. UV fluorescence-based biological detection is based on the fluorescence properties of one or more of the following four compounds: tryptophan, tyrosine, phenylalanine, and Nicotinamide Adenine Dingcleotide Hydride (NADH).
