Press Release

Enschede, the Netherlands – 25 April 2006

LioniX Goes To Mars

After three years of absence, LioniX BV, will be exhibiting at the Hannover Messe 2006. In these years we have grown from 10 to 20 employees in spite of the economical downturn. This fact confirms our confidence in the potential of LioniX as a leading development and production provider in the area of micro/nanotechnology.

At the Hannover Messe we will demonstrate the progress in our core competences integrated optics and microfluidics applied in application areas such as telecom components and biosensor & lab-on-a-chip systems.

With regard to the latter, LioniX is proud to announce its participation in a consortium which is chosen to build the Life Marker Chip instrument for the ESA ExoMars mission planned in 2011. This most advanced and extreme compact instrument of the Pasteur payload will analyse samples from the Mars rocky soil on ‘extant and extinct life’ bio-molecules, fully automated – as there are as far as is known no green Martians to handle the instrument. LioniX will be the provider of the core technology in the LMC instrument, which is based on our expertise in integrated optics (micro-array based on Light Induced Fluorescence detection) and microfuidic systems (pumps, valves, sensors).

Especially in the integrated optics area LioniX is entering the nanotechnology realm with its unique 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. Planar waveguides on chip have about the same functionality as classical fibers. The clue of the LioniX’ revolutionary TriPleX™ technology (patents pending) is the control of the material and structural properties on the nanoscale of a silicon-oxide/silicon-nitride based waveguide, in a standard microelectronics technology based process (CMOS). Thanks to this technology, 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 ESA/space projects, EU and nationally funded projects and applied in product development for commercial customers. A shining example is the IQ+ FLOW mass. The core of this product is a microsystems technology based chip with heaters and thermopiles, developed and manufactured by LioniX and enabling an extreme fast and accurate measurement of tiny flows. This flow sensor is property of the Dutch company Bronkhorst High-Tech, a world-renowned supplier of advanced flow sensing instruments and systems.

To know more about LioniX developments and technologies, come visit us in the Hall 15 booth D36 from April 24 to 28.