[nanoPost] Sensor Chips for Chemical and Biological Detection Devices

Company USA

In today's geopolitical climate, this technology provides vital airport and homeland security, as integrated in new end user products and as a means of upgrading existing airport security systems. For instance, upgrading a smart smoke detector to detect chemical warfare agents, explosives or other compounds could be as easy as downloading new parameters to the device.

The company is assembling a variety of platforms incorporating its chips for utilization in a wide range of end user products ranging from handheld devices and control components to sensor modules. The technology has the power to enable a far more widespread use of these chemical and biological agent detection systems due to lower costs, fewer false positives and simplicity of use.

The technology separates and detects ionized compounds based on their differential mobilities through the sensor chip. Ionized compounds have mobilities that are a function of their charge, mass and cross-sectional area.

Applying an RF and DC field to the sensor chip can act as a filter selecting a chosen ion or collection of ions. The applied DC and RF fields can be used as parameters to identify the ions together with additional information (field dependence) which is unique to microDMx™ technology.

Whereas conventional IMS (ion mobility spectroscopy) samples as little as 1% of the ionized species, the chip samples close to 100%, resulting in increased sensitivity. Conventional IMS also suffers from the inability to positively identify ions because it only uses one parameter at a time, whereas the technology uses at least four independent parameters simultaneously.

Further advantages of the chips include lower manufacturing costs due to MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) manufacturing, and its small compact "chip-sized" package.