One niche could be to design and make specialized chips, e.g. a chip directly integrated with micro-electronic, or optoelectronic devices at chip level. Microfluidics is obviously one of the crucial areas for NRC to land on if NRC wants to be the leader of the field. Micro structures such as channels, arrays, voids etc. In particular, by proper control of laser parameters microstructures with a desired texture or finishing can be produced. I foresee this is not only useful for biochips with special functions, but also a challenge to microfluidic theories.
Lasers are the tool of tools.
In the area of manufacturing, lasers have the advantages of fast prototyping, making special, customized devices efficiently. I believe that this would be also the case for making biochips if we really explore it in that way. In the short term, the biotech community and academia would be greatly helped by inexpensive access to DNA chips. Since a rate limiting step is the acquisition, archiving and amplification of material to be arrayed NRC could play a role in this by establishing such a repository and also assist in microarray printing. We have had some preliminary discussions with Pierre Thibault at IBS to explore ways in which some neat things we're doing here, and which involve hardware which is not yet commercially available, could be used in combination with the microfluidic sample introduction systems he is currently using for mass spectrometry.