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Ion Torrent has invented the first device a new semiconductor chip capable of directly translating chemical signals into digital information. The first application of this technology is sequencing DNA. The device leverages decades of semiconductor technology advances, and in just a few years has brought the entire design, fabrication and supply chain infrastructure of that industry a trillion dollar investment to bear on the challenge of sequencing.
The result is Ion semiconductor sequencing, the first commercial sequencing technology that does not use light, and as a result delivers unprecedented speed, scalability and low cost. All of these benefits are a result of applying a technology that is massively scalable, as proven by Moore‘s Law, to a task that has traditionally used optics-based solutions, which work in a linear fashion: increasing capacity requires increasing the number of signals that must be read resulting in longer run times, higher capital costs and ever more sophisticated optics. By contrast, Ion Torrent semiconductor technology can provide increases in chip capacity without impacting capital costs or runtime. Ion Torrent sequencing uses only natural (label-free) reagents and takes place in Ion semiconductor microchips that contain sensors which have been fabricated as individual electronic detectors, allowing one sequence read per sensor. We will show how the technology has scaled in just a few months from ~1 million sensors in the firstgeneration Ion 314 chips to ~7 million sensors in the secondgeneration Ion 316 chips all while maintaining the same 1- to 2- hour runtime. We will also demonstrate that Ion semiconductor sequencing provides exceptional accuracy, long read length and
scalability on a single, affordable bench-top sequencing platform. |
