This is London Calling.
I used to like The Clash. I suppose their working-class revolutionary spirit appealed to me. Of course then you find out that Joe Strummer went to a school “where thick rich people sent their thick rich kids”… and had significantly more opportunities than most.
I guess revolutionaries are not always what they appear to be… but perhaps this doesn’t make the music any worse.
Anyway! Oxford Nanopore have made some platform announcements at London Calling 2023! The most interesting of which is the development of a new line of ASICs.
Slides suggest that the ASICs are fairly old (if only someone had imaged these!). They have therefore has been due an update for quite some time, and it seems that time has come.
The most interesting slide presented shows the SmidgION ASIC:
What’s particularly interesting is the diagram on the top left showing the routing of the well array down to the ASIC. Previous iterations of the flow cell had well electrodes routed directly down through the PCB to the ASIC. This was to “ensure a short connection path with minimal parasitic capacitance”. However it means that both the nanopore array and the ASIC have to be exactly the same size.
These new ASICs seem to have solved this problem, meaning you can potentially use a smaller ASIC with a larger array. The slides show a ~6x6 die which can support 400 channels. On a modern process estimates suggest this would cost ~$10 an older process might be as low as $1. For the new MinION ASIC they’re looking at 2048 channels, so $5 to $50.
The bigger concern is that this implies that the nanopore array itself hasn’t shrunk. So while you might be able to save money on the ASIC, costs associated with the array itself remain. Fabrication of that array is likely costly both due to the use of novel materials (Platinum or perhaps now Silver) and likely significantly lower yields than standard CMOS processes.
So while these ASIC changes are welcome, I personally wouldn’t expect them to have a massive impact on margins/COGS. So…
“The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin”
Or is it? Find out after the break!