I never thought about it this way, but it makes sense now why the DNA sequencing market grew so fast and why prices fell so hard. A lot of that success came from how quickly it got automated by borrowing innovations from the semis industry like high speed sensors, accelerated computing, even the flow cells themselves were made with nanoimprint lithography. Once sequencing was riding on the scaling laws of the semi industry the price to sequence a genome fell faster than almost any technology in history including fabricating transistors. I wish more people thought about automation through this lens instead of always defaulting to robotics. I think there's still a lot of alpha in applying semiconductor tech to other fields and there's plenty of historical precedent that proves this. CCDs for example were designed as a memory technology before they ended up in cameras and DRAM cells can be repurposed as cheap particle detectors as well. Biosensing in particular seems to be the most interesting given the scale of things you're trying to measure.
