Synthesis and Manufacturers
The two main ways of synthesizing tiling arrays are photolithographic manufacturing and mechanical spotting or printing.
The first method involves in situ synthesis where probes, approximately 25bp, are built on the surface of the chip. These arrays can hold up to 6 million discrete features, each of which contains millions of copies of one probe.
The other way of synthesizing tiling array chips is via mechanically printing probes onto the chip. This is done by using automated machines with pins that place the previously synthesized probes onto the surface. Due to the size restriction of the pins, these chips can hold up to nearly 400,000 features. Three manufacturers of tiling arrays are Affymetrix, NimbleGen and Agilent. Their products vary in probe length and spacing.
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