US Semiconductor giant Motorola Inc has announced that it plans to manufacture biochips – also known as gene chips – as well as the silicon chips it is better known for. These chips are predicted to speed up molecular biology tasks like gene sequencing by 1000 times at a tenth of the price. Motorola is trying to grab a slice of a potentially vast market, where everything from water quality to the probability of developing heart disease can be diagnosed instantly with biochips. Biochips are designed to take advantage of the fundamental property of DNA, called hybridization, where two complementary strands of DNA zip up if they match. So if various different sequences of DNA are laid on specially designed silicon slides – so-called biochips – large quantities of DNA can be scanned. Motorola has licensed the technology in an alliance with privately-held analytical medical instrument company Packard Instrument Co and both companies will invest $19m to commercialize the technology, with Packard manufacturing the instrumentation and Motorola the chips. The pair have licensed the intellectual property from the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, which co-developed the technology with the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology. Motorola will not be able to re-use its existing fabrication facilities to produce the chips, but its experience in the semiconductor, field emission and glass micro- machining technologies will boost the speed to market, says Motorola vice president and corporate director of strategy Rudyard Istavan.
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