The company is developing advanced semiconductor devices, including chips relevant to quantum computing and medical diagnostics, for potential deployment and use across multiple industries.
These new chips were fabricated at foundry partner VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland via a multi-project wafer run (MPW) on a 200mm wafer. Chips from the wafer are being packaged for testing at Archer.
Archer is developing an at-home potassium tester that will comprise of a hand-held digital reader in which a cartridge is inserted. The heart of the cartridge is the company’s biochip, which needs to be integrated with cartridge fluidics for delivery of the blood sample for sensing. Integrating the biochip with miniaturised electronics, as Archer has done with VTT, is a key step to integrating the biochip into the cartridge.
This integration work will continue in parallel with the ongoing development of the chip itself. The development and integration activities will be targeted at having early prototypes of the system and demonstration of initial potassium testing accuracy performance early in 2026.
Archer plans to verify the operation of these new integrated chips in Sydney. The design of these integrated chips will feed into the development work Archer is conducting with Hylid Diagnostics that will begin integrating the sensor with homolysis sensors and cartridge designs to house the sensors, and interface with fluidics and a hand-held reader.
Commenting on the chips from VTT, Dr Simon Ruffell, CEO of Archer, said, “One path to producing a cost effective, small sensing product for wide electronic application is to integrate our gFET sensors with a silicon readout chip. This work is a big step forward to show that it is possible. The team now looks forward to validating its functionality and evaluating sensing performance.
“This work is an enabler for our ion-sensing technology, helps integrate our Biochip into an at-home potassium monitor, and builds a platform for more product applications beyond the testing of chronic kidney disease.”
