Ann: Biochip gFET technology design transfer to a commercial fab, page-44

From what I understand, a Lab on a Chip (LOC) can be built to do many things. The trick, I guess, is to first get it to do ONE thing.

Getting a bit out of my depth here, but maybe someone more knowledgeable can build on this:

Archer is basing their LOC on a Graphene Field Effect Transistor (gFET). The graphene is a sheet of carbon only 1 atom thick and it is exquisitely sensitive to changes. But just graphene by itself is not much use. It has to be primed or coated with stuff to detect whatever it is one is looking for.
So, for example, if one wanted to make a LOC to detect a virus, one might coat the graphene with antibodies to that virus. If a sample containing virus was added, the virus would bind to the antibodies, inducing a conformational change that would be picked up by the gFET, which would signal “positive”.

The question I have is: who is doing the surface preparation of the graphene? Is Archer doing that “in house” or will they contract that out?
I doubt that it would be done in a chip foundry as it is biotech work, rather than physics, but I could well be wrong.
A further question I have is about timing: would the graphene be coated after the LOC is assembled or prior? It would be nice if Archer could communicate all this in a generic “flow chart” kind of way but it might be too commercially sensitive.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I invested in Archer because I was enthralled by the idea of room-temp quantum computing. Funnily enough, my background is in biology ( but not LOC’s!)

cheers,

FHC