The SmidgION

Someone mentioned Oxford Nanopore’s SmidgION the other day, and suggested that based on the London Calling presentation is could be super low cost. As in <$10 or $20. This seems unlikely to me, so I figured I try and communicate why.

Let’s look at the information we currently have on the SmidgION. Firstly, the SmidgION was first announced 7 years ago in 2016. So this has been in the pipeline for a long time.

While I don’t see a fixed release date, the London Calling presentation showed a bit more information than we’ve seen before. Including some PCB images, showing both the ASIC and either the nanopore array or the location where it mounts:

Oxford Nanopore advisor Ewan Birney showed a somewhat similar (but not identical PCB):

The presentation also stated that the SmidgION ASIC is roughly 6mm wide.

Putting this together we get a nanopore array of 10mm by 8mm:

This looks fairly similar to the Flongle dimensions shown elsewhere:

Dimensioning off that pipette tip. I measured the array size as ~9mm by ~12mm. The Flongle currently sells for $90. The array size of the SmidgION seems similar to the Flongle. As such, it’s hard for me to see how at current margins we can expect the SmidgION to be lower cost than the Flongle.

But wait! Maybe that’s just a prototype! What if make the array smaller! Well… there are limits there too. Find out after the break!