What's MEMS?

Earlier last March I mentioned about as a possible research topic for my final year, but haven't elaborated much on it. For those who don't know, MEMS stands for Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, which is quite an amazing technology.

We all know microchips, yes? Intel processing chips, Kingston RAM memory modules, and any of those little black squares that have tiny metal legs poking out of them. If you manage to pry open those black casings, you'll realize the electronics is much smaller than it's plastic housing. Try 1 billion transistors in just a few square mm's. Marvels of engineering, yes? :)

While the semiconductor industry strives to fit in more transistors in an ever shrinking die size of the IC, there emerged a different type of technology. With such huge investments in monolithic fabrication technology, it'll be a waste to just fit tiny electronic gates. What about mini mechanical actuators, sensors and structures too? You can actually fabricate a machine thats only a millimeter in size! That is the main purpose of MEMS; to give the ability to put an entire system onto a single chip. The implication of that includes low power consumption, ease of implementation into diverse situations, and much more.

A size comparison between a MEMS device and a human hair strand.

There is quite a number of applications for MEMS devices. They can be used in Accelerometers, Acoustic Emissions Detectors, Ultrasonic Flaw Detectors, and even Bio Sensors. Some research into bio transducers include the Miniature Heart Cell Force Transducer System, which is a fully submersible system for use with isolated heart cells to measure minute forces (even down to the nano N ranges). You can't do that with a normal sensor, right? ;)

If you do want to know more information on the fabrication processes, or just other info in General, you can check these links:
http://www.smalltechconsulting.com/What_is_MEMS.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEMS
http://memscyclopedia.org/introMEMS.html

Anyway, I'll be focusing more on the realm of RF MEMS. While there hasn't been any major commercialization of that technology, it's still a very sought area for research. Could be an opportune time for me to do some interesting research findings ;)

My apologies for the technical (aka boring) post! *grin*