A Dutch company said it plans to unveil a lab-on-a-chip system Monday intended to analyze rocky Martian soil for signs of life on a future ESA mission to the red planet. Lionix BV said it intends to present its chip at the Product Market Microtechnology/Advanced Materials in Hannover, Germany.
The Product Market unites more than 50 exhibitors worldwide and is organized by the IVAM Microtechnology Network. The company said it is participating in a consortium that is building the Life Marker Chip for ESAs ExoMars mission, currently planned for 2011.
The chip is meant to be an extremely compact, fully-automated instrument – part of the missions Pasteur payload – to analyze samples of Martian rocky soil for “extant and extinct” bio-molecules.
Lionix will provide the core technology in the LMC, which will be based on integrated optics and microfluidic systems.
The company said the chip will enter the nanotechnology realm with its planar waveguide technology, allowing for complex optical functions on a single chip, such as switching and filtering of optically coded datacom signals applied in telecom applications.
The key to the instrument is the Lionix TriPleX technology, which can control material and structural properties on the nanoscale using a silicon-oxide/silicon-nitride based waveguide, in a standard microelectronics technology based process.
Lionix has developed a ring resonator that is considered the equivalent of an optical transistor and an essential building block for a variety of optical signal-processing functions.
Along with the Life Marker Chip technology, Lionix said it also will demonstrate its progress in integrated optics and microfluidics in areas such as telecom components and biosensors.
IVAM is an international association of companies and institutes in the field of microtechnology. It includes more than 170 companies and institutes from twelve countries in Europe, Asia and the United States.
