Labs on Chip

Introduction

Miniaturization is one of the key technology elements that have changed human life over the past 60 years, enabling a large number of functions to be packed into a very compact space at a cost that is orders of magnitude less than that of macroscopic equipment performing the same functions.

The most astounding example of miniaturization is microelectronics, but integrated optics also has a wide role especially in sensors and telecommunications. This is demonstrated by the plot in Figure I.1, where the dimension of the channel of CMOS transistors is shown for different generations of microelectronic circuits. In the figure, each step in reducing the CMOS channel width is called a technology node, following the nomenclature used by ...