TSMC And DNA Sequencing...

A while back on the Discord I joked that TSMC should buy PacBio, in part because of all the amazing semiconductor development work that’s gone into PacBio’s chips.

TSMC then popped up on my radar again today when I was looking through patents. So let’s take a look at some of the things that TSMC has been doing in sequencing!

For those who don’t know… Taiwanese company TSMC is the largest manufacturer of semiconductors in the world. As such, it’s unsurprisingly that they’ve been involved in pretty much every aspect of chip fabrication.

That includes developing semiconductor based DNA sequencing chips!

Whose chips have they been making? Well, TSMC have publicly stated that they make the Ion Torrent chips for Thermo:

PacBio also appear to have used them for the RS series instruments (the old, platform where the sensing happened off chip). I get the impression from public presentations that they moved away for TSMC after that. There are also public statements showing they collaborated with IMEC.

Do TSMC do any fab work for Oxford Nanopore? The nanopore array itself seems to use Platinum electrodes, this would not be compatible with CMOS TSMCs process, so I suspect is done elsewhere. The acquisition ASIC (which in Oxford’s platform is a separate semiconductor) could be… but I couldn’t find a public statement on this. Same goes for Genia.

On the patent side TSMC have a number of neat patents, most focus on what looks like a digital fluidic sequencing system:

But they also have IP relating to ISFET sensing (I assume coming from the Thermo collaboration). Others show integrated optical filters/lenses/waveguides somewhat reminiscent of the PacBio approach (but not explicitly targeted toward DNA sequencing):

A lot of this appears quite speculative. With little in the way of practical examples.

I suspect for TSMC DNA sequencing and other “Biosensing” applications are such a small market that this work is very much a side-project. But it’s probably appealing to have this IP in their back pocket “just in case”.

Overall, it seems unlikely that we’ll see any major innovations coming from TSMC. But the prospect of DNA sequencing (and other biotech) companies being able to leverage advanced semiconductor manufacturing processing remains compelling. With a number of companies having pursued semiconductor sequencers of one form or another:

• Ion Torrent

• Genapsys

• QuantumSi

• Pacific Biosciences

• Oxford Nanopore

• The iSeq (Illumina)

• DNAe

Often producing useful research tools, but as yet no real breakout hits. TSMC, along with the rest of us, will just have to keep waiting for that ever elusive “product-market-fit”.

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