The developers of Ion Torrent semiconductor sequencing have marketed it as a rapid, compact and economical sequencer that can be utilized in a large number of laboratories as a bench top machine. The company hopes that their system will take sequencing outside of specialized centers and into the reach of hospitals and smaller laboratories. A January 2011 New York Times article, [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/health/05gene.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=hospitals "Taking DNA Sequencing to the Masses"], underlines these ambitions.
Due to the ability of alternative sequencing methods to achieve a greater read length (and therefore being more suited to whole genome analysis) this technology may be best suited to small scale applications such as microbial genome sequencing, microbial transcriptome sequencing, targeted sequencing, amplicon sequencing, or for quality testing of sequencing libraries.