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MIT's Deshpande Center was established in 2002 to "accelerate the migration of ideas from the lab to practical commercial application". The Deshpande Center provides MIT faculty and students with small cash grants along with systematic mentoring, resulting in the creation of twenty new start-ups to date. Many of these projects and start-ups are highlighted at the Deshpande’s annual Ideastream Conference. Unsurprisingly, these can involve MEMS and microfabrication -- at this year’s conference, held in Boston on April 13, the plenary session alone had three separate presentations involving MEMS and microfabrication.
A leading supplier of airbag sensors worldwide with more than 500 million units shipped, Analog Devices diversified from accelerometers, gyroscopes, and inertial measurement units with its first MEMS microphone over a year ago. Recently ADI (NYSE, constituent S&P 500) announced two new MEMS microphones aimed at high-fidelity audio applications such as voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP), voice recognition and hands-free communicators, translators, and dictation applications.
There is an increasingly expanding interest in through-wafer via (TWV) and through-silicon via (TSV) technologies. In this comprehensive interview, we discuss TWV and TSV process options with Chris Gudeman, VP Process Development at Innovative Micro Technology. Dr. Gudeman comments on material and process selection, costs, technology development challenges and trends as well as relevant applications such as RF, magnetics and interposers.
Many MEMS sensors have a moving part that responds to environmental stimuli with motion. An accelerometer, for instance, capacitively senses a moving "proof mass" that responds to displacements of just a few microns. However, a MEMS device's sensitivity could be vastly increased if motions as small as a few nanometers could be sensed.
Now Tel Aviv University claims that standard MEMS devices can sense nanometer-scale motions by switching from capacitive sensing to sensing the change in resistance in a tiny carbon nanotube. Resistance changes in nanotubes can be detected when they are stretched by just a few nanometers, allowing them to multiply the sensitivity of a MEMS sensor by as much as 100 times.
Not long ago, the MEMS community borrowed lithography and batch fabrication techniques from IC manufacturing to build precise and inexpensive mechanical devices. Today, MEMS devices have found their way into our phones, automobiles, and televisions, as well as the path of the bits and bytes being streamed for voice, video, and data communications. MEMS has greatly benefited the systems we use on a daily basis, and the experience gained from mass production has led to a greater understanding of materials and packaging techniques that are otherwise unpopular in microelectronics.
Energy harvesting is an attractive way to power MEMS sensors and locator devices such as GPS; however, the power harvesting technologies often fall short in terms of power output. For example, vibratory MEMS generators might give out only microwatts of electrical power. While this may be sufficient for emerging ultra low power sensors, many current applications require milliwatt power levels. As an example, commercially available running sensors for shoes consume over 100 uW of electrical power and requirements for GPS locators are even higher.
The case for “harsh environment MEMS” -- devices that can operate at extreme pressures, temperatures, and in corrosive backgrounds -- is that they can be deployed in potentially lucrative applications and markets that cannot be served with traditional silicon-based MEMS. Over two years ago here in the MEMS Investor Journal, Professor Roya Maboudian of the University of California Berkeley gave an excellent overview of research efforts in silicon carbide MEMS and the technical challenges in their development. However, since that article was published there has been little progress in their commercial deployment.
MEMS has enabled a complete phased-array radar to fit on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). NASA has commissioned the Georgia Institute of Technology with a $2.4 million grant to build the lightweight, low-cost and pint-sized phased array radar to map the Earth's changing ice sheets and snow formations, potentially answering vexing questions about global climate change.
Cornell University researchers have designed millimeter-sized spacecraft that are only microns thick and weigh just a few milligrams. These spacecraft-on-a-chip are currently just prototypes, but if their test launch goes as planned next month, MEMS will eventually be used to craft all of the "moving parts" on future spacecraft-on-a-chip.
A new MEMS gyroscope architecture with no moving parts will debut later this year from Qualtre Inc. (Marlborough, Mass.). The startup's inertial sensor designs are based on bulk acoustic wave (BAW) propagation.
Qualtre was formed back in 2007, but its first round of venture funding of $5 million came in 2008 from Matrix Partners (Waltham, Mass.) and Pilot House Ventures (Boston). Since then the development team has been working on commercializing the BAW technology conceived at the Georgia Tech microelectronics lab by Professor Farrokh Ayazi, who is now on sabbatical and serving as Chief Technology Officer at Qualtre.
