Dutch Company Shows Life Marker Chip at IVAM Pavilion/Hannover Fair

A lab-on-a-chip system for analysis of Mars rocky soil will be presented at the Product Market Microtechnology / Advanced Materials at Hannover Fair 2006 from April 24 to 28.

The Product Market at the MicroTechnology unites 50 exhibitors from all over the world and is organized by IVAM Microtechnology Network.

The Dutch company Lionix BV will demonstrate the progress in integrated optics and microfluidics applied in areas such as telecom components, biosensor and lab-on-a-chip systems.

With regard to the latter, Lionix announces its participation in a consortium which is chosen to build the Life Marker Chip instrument for the ESA ExoMars mission planned for 2011.

This extremely compact, fully-automated instrument of the Pasteur payload will analyse samples from the Mars rocky soil on ‘extant and extinct life’ bio-molecules.

Especially in the integrated optics area Lionix is entering the nanotechnology realm with its planar waveguide technology, Page 2 of 2 allowing for complex optical functions on a single chip such as switching and filtering of optically coded datacom signals applied in telecom applications.

The clue of the Lionix’ TriPleX™ technology is the control of the material and structural properties on the nanoscale of a siliconoxide/ silicon-nitride based waveguide, in a standard microelectronics technology based process (CMOS).

Lionix has developed a ring resonator which is to be considered as the ‘transistor’ in the optical field and an essential ‘building block’ for a variety of optical signal processing functions.

All these developments are facilitated through a growing participation in SA/space projects.

To know more about the micro and nano developments of international companies and institutes, please visit the IVAM joint pavilion in hall 15, booth D36.