PacBio's Sensors - Sequel Layouts, Revio /is/ single channel?

Yesterday someone was asking me if PacBio used an off-the-shelf image sensor and built their ZMWs on top of it. My assumption has always been that the whole chip is custom, but I couldn’t remember any explicit statements in this regard.

So I decided to go hunting! And I found rather more than I bargained for, including some evidence that the Revio is single channel after all!

Turns out there a couple of interesting presentations for PacBio where they describe the Sequel platform in some detail. This gives us some solid answer as to how the platform was implemented here, and tells us why building ZMWs on a off-the-shelf chip might be problematic.

The first is a presentation from Annette Grot. This describes some of the challenges at a high level and shows us the Sequel concept: