WaferGen is a California Bay-Area company that originally developed an idea similar to BioTrove, which was to create a solid substrate with nanoliter-sized wells for high throughput real-time PCR. WaferGen’s SmartChip™ has 5,184 wells (that’s a 54 multiple of 96), while BioTrove’s OpenArray™ has 3,072 (that’s a 32 multiple of 96). The concept is that each well contains a real-time assay master mix and the sample of interest, and a flexible format of sample number / real-time targets (either gene expression or end-point genotyping) can be performed in a single run.