美国Ion Torrent 
Ion Torrent公司成立于2007年,由454生命科学公司的创始人创建.总部设在康涅迪格州吉尔福德（Guilford）.2010年将推出个人基因组测序仪.
离子激流公司（Ion Torrent）的测序仪就是一种硅芯片，是利用与半导体一样的方式构建的，利用这种技术，科学家们在Science杂志上公布了三个低成本的完整人类基因组序列。


  
on Torrent™ has pioneered an entirely new approach to sequencing that enables a direct connection between chemical and digital information. Ion Torrent technology doesn't use light—it's the first commercial Post-Light Sequencing™ technology.

Instead, Ion Torrent marries simple chemistry to incredibly powerful, proven semiconductor technology—it's Watson meets Moore. The result is a sequencing system that is simpler, faster, more cost effective and scalable than any other technology available. The company's goal is to democratize sequencing and make this critical technology available to every lab.

Up to now scientists have had to go through an intermediary, such as light, to translate chemical data into digital data. That approach requires proprietary chemistry and optics, like cameras, lasers and scanners. As a result sequencing is complex, slow, and hugely expensive, making it accessible only to the biggest research labs.

By contrast, Ion Torrent sequencing technology requires no proprietary chemistries or optics because it's based on a simple chemical reaction. When a nucleotide is incorporated into a strand of DNA by a polymerase, a hydrogen ion is released as a byproduct. That hydrogen ion carries a charge which our proprietary ion sensor can detect. If a nucleotide, for example a C, is added to a DNA template and a signal is detected, you know that nucleotide was incorporated. Our sequencer—essentially the world's smallest solid-state pH meter—has called the base, going directly from chemical information to digital information. Because this is direct detection, each nucleotide run happens in seconds and you can do an entire run in about an hour.

What sets Ion Torrent apart from other sequencing methods is that we don't just borrow ideas from the semiconductor industry, we actually use the entire semiconductor supply chain. Because Ion Torrent produces its proprietary semiconductor chips in standard CMOS factories, we leverage the $1 trillion dollar investment that has been made in the semiconductor industry over the past 40 years.

Ion Torrent also directly benefits from four decades of exponential improvement in semiconductor technology, also known as Moore's Law. This provides massive scalability. Wafer-based semiconductor production enables our chips to scale in density for any application, from small, targeted experiments, to large genomes, all on a single platform. Our chips scale in volume because there are many manufacturing facilities around the world that can manufacture them, giving us a huge production capacity.

The semiconductor has transformed every industry it's touched. Just as the microprocessor enabled desktop computing to displace the mainframe, Ion Torrent semiconductor technology will inevitably democratize sequencing, putting it within the reach of any lab or clinic.