The Oxford Nanopore MinION puts a DNA and RNA sequencer in your hand for $2,000. Trialed in 2014 and commercially released in 2015, the device was detailed by Miten Jain et al. in Genome Biology. YouTuber mikeselectricstuff tore one open, and the internals are worth examining.
The main unit runs a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA with a slim active cooling solution. The real hardware story is inside the consumable sequencing cartridge, priced at £690 per unit and good for only a few runs: high-density pitch ICs on both sides of a PCB, flanking a microfluidics system that guides sample fluid across the nanopore array. That consumable cost is what the teardown makes viscerally clear.
The MinION is discontinued, but consumables remain available. The full video shows exactly how the nanopore chip is constructed and how the fluidics interface with it, details no spec sheet includes. If you want to understand where commodity sequencing hardware is heading, this is the baseline to study.
[READ ORIGINAL →]