Month: September 2010

The Texas Analog Center of Excellence at UT Dallas has awarded nearly $1.7 million in grants to Texas researchers to develop new technology for solar cells, biosensors, implantable heart defibrillators and much more.

“The primary theme of these three-year grants is to address grand challenges from the semiconductor industry’s International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors,” said Dr. Eric Vogel, associate director of TxACE and an associate professor of materials science and engineering at UT Dallas. “Addressing the challenges in the ITRS requires circuit design research in three main areas: management and optimization of circuit power and energy, design of robust circuits and design of high-performance circuits.” (more…)

On August 17th, 2010, Life Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: LIFE), a provider of innovative life science solutions, announced a definitive agreement to acquire Ion Torrent for $375 million in cash and stock and an additional $350 million upon the meeting time-based milestones through 2012. Ion Torrent has been building the next generation of fully-electronic and CMOS-based DNA sequencing platforms, a technology which was co-invented by Professor Arjang Hassibi while at Stanford University (US Patent 7,223,540), now an Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin.

This technology has revolutionized DNA sequencing by enabling electronic sequence-by-synthesis analysis through the use of IC technology. Ion Torrent’s proprietary CMOS-based method has created a new paradigm in DNA sequencing by using PostLight(TM) sequencing technology, the first of its kind to eliminate the cost and complexity associated with the extended optical detection currently used in all other DNA sequencers.

This is not the first attempt to commercialize Professor Hassibi’s invention. In 2001 he co-founded Xagros Genomics, Inc. to commercialize CMOS-based sequencers, but the startup was unable to overcome some of the technical challenges, something that Ion Torrent was able to address this time.

For more information on Ion Torrent, go to:
http://www.iontorrent.com/

For more information on Professor Hassibi’s research, go to:
http://www.cerc.utexas.edu/~arjang/