Embedded CMOS bioinformatics for nanopore sequencers

DNA sequencing is quickly evolving into a mobile technology with a need for power efficient compute services. This paper describes such a service in the form of a VLSI base caller chip for nanopore-based 3rd generation DNA sequencers. The base caller achieves a throughput equivalent to 10 human genomes per hour with a power consumption of 200 mW. This represents a 100× power reduction over a general-purpose solution with a 1000× improvement in throughput.