<nmz787>
so me being interesting in making a nanopore DNA sequencer, was looking into solidstate nanopores, and the limitation seems to be that to get per-basepair electrical discrimination, you need electrodes that are pretty much as thin or thinner than a base (0.33 nm)... so I guess I need to figure out monolayer metal deposition, to sandwich between some semiconductor/glass and then punch a hole through with
<nmz787>
etch or FIB.... something like that
<SpeedEvil>
I have real questions you can possibly make it cheaper than the current offering
<SpeedEvil>
Aren't there hundreds of nanopores in them?
<SpeedEvil>
Also IIRC considerable secret sauce goes into the assembly
pie_ has joined #homecmos
pie_ has quit [Ping timeout: 255 seconds]
<nmz787>
SpeedEvil: well this is for roadmapping to the semiconductor industry... so $ is the name of the game (keeping consumer storage progressing to be cheaper and more dense)
<SpeedEvil>
Also, it must be patented I'd have thought
<SpeedEvil>
how long ago was it
<nmz787>
SpeedEvil: current nanopore sequencers that are commercialized use protein nanopores, which aren't too hardy... they only guarantee them to work for ~ 12 hours
<SpeedEvil>
only 12 hours is a _lot_
<nmz787>
not in terms of data storage for the data industry
<SpeedEvil>
Oh - not for that.
<nmz787>
1 (protein) nanopore can currently read at 450 nucleotides per second... a device with 512 and 70% active/usable over 2 days yields 5 - 10 Giga bases read
<nmz787>
that is 10-20 giga bits read
<nmz787>
industry SSDs can saturate a PCIe bus at 6GByte/s
<nmz787>
(obviously parallelism can help this)
<nmz787>
but SSDs also have much longer endurance... say 10000 read cycles (or is that write)
<nmz787>
anyway, making the electrode or the separation between the two sides of a nanopore very thin is key to being able to sequence
<nmz787>
otherwise you sense multiple nucleotides at once, and the signals are muddled together
<SpeedEvil>
If you could make it cheap it would be really valuable for sequencing.
<SpeedEvil>
For example, food validation, gardening, ...
<SpeedEvil>
'what disease has my plant got'
<nmz787>
well cheap is relative to economies of scale here, I think
<nmz787>
life sciences market might not reduce the cost for decades... semiconductor industry using DNA as a convenient workaround for transistor scaling limits could boost the tech significantly
<nmz787>
since semiconductor is a consumer market
<nmz787>
(even data archival is used by i.e. credit companies)
<X-Scale>
I'm mostly out of the loop, but how far are people from being able to build a 6502 IC at home, with the same process dimensions as it was first built back in 1975 ?
<SpeedEvil>
X-Scale: pretty much not. If you mean with DIY tools. In principle you can buy an old FIB machine.
<SpeedEvil>
I am unsure if anyone at least has published truly homebuilt stuff more advanced than several transistors on a die.