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Biological Chips Today’s typical chip or microchip usually consists of a semiconducting material known as silicon and contains an electronic circuit. Chips are usually less than ¼-square inches while it contains millions of transistors (“chip”, Webopedia). The small size of chips helps them make computers “fast, compact, and inexpensive”. Chips are also referred to as integrated circuits and they are the hallmark of present day computers (“chip”, Microsoft Encarta). Researchers in computer science and biology are currently looking to implement a new type of chip composed of biological elements such as fragments of DNA. These chips are called biological chips (biochips) (Stikeman, 2001). Roughly any device that incorporates biological or organic materials upon a substrate that is solid can be called a biochip. The manufacturing of biochips has two major requirements. First a silicon chip has to be constructed using extreme precision. Secondly, lots of care must be used while dealing with delicate DNA molecules (Kailkhura, 2002). Affymetrix Inc., of Santa Clara (Kailkhura, 2002) is a company that pioneered the biochip technology (Economist, 1999), which incorporates biotechnology with semiconductor manufacturing techniques.
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