micro pillar array - the future of chromatography?!

Nowadays, high sensitivity LCMS requires nanoLC in front of a state of the art mass spec. However, these nanoLC-MS systems need to be maintained intensively to avoid downtimes (due to column clogging), especially when analyzing an high number of samples.
This means improving robustness and performance of nanoLC are a major objective in academia and industry.

While skiming to keynote lecture of the MaxQuant Summer School the invention of micro chip pillar array column as chromatographic device integrated into LCMS setup was mentioned.
In my optinion these chips offer a great opportunity to overcome the limits of traditional nanoLC since they eliminate the column specific eddy dispersion and display incrediable low backpressure at column length of up to 2m.

I took this picture from the introductional video...really impressive and worth watching https://vimeo.com/230455032
I try to find out how these chips are manufactured. Which brought me to an belgian company called pharmafluidics.

https://www.pharmafluidics.com/

By the way for the people out there seeking for a new challenge they have open job vacancies currently. But back to the micro pillar chips - They are made of silicon pillars which are the result of an etching process which removes the interstitial volume in a really reproducible and homogeneous manner. These manufacturing methods have been successfully applied in the semiconductor industry. I am really looking forward to read studies evaluting proteomics performance of these chips.