MEMS at Freescale

We recently spoke with Dave Monk, Freescale's Silicon Technology and Microsystems manager.

MEMS Investor Journal: Freescale is one of the leading companies in terms of MEMS commercialization.  What are your top 3 MEMS products today? 

Dave Monk: It depends upon the definition for "top".  I will assume this is meant to be top revenue opportunities today.  I would state that these are: DMD, ink-jet print heads, and inertial sensors for airbag deployment.  My reply is based on information from a recent market study by Yole Developpment in which they have ranked the top 30 MEMS manufacturers; these results reflect that data.

MIJ:  What are the main challenges that you have seen in taking a MEMS product from the initial prototype stage to high volume fabrication? 

DM: The main challenge that I have observed for us and others in taking MEMS products from the initial prototype stage to high volume fabrication is what we term "industrialization".  This is a process by which there are large run rates of products for short periods of time run through the production process lines to determine what issues may come up during ramp-up.  This is still not done throughout the industry routinely and because of the limited maturity of MEMS (vs. for example, CMOS technology), there still exist issues that are only seen in the ppm range and not in the small volume prototype stage.

MIJ: What do you think are the top MEMS applications that will emerge over the next 1-2 years? 

DM: We believe, as do many market studies (e.g., Strategy Analytics and EMTECH), that the top emerging markets in MEMS during that timeframe will be in low g/angular rate for vehicle dynamic stability, tire pressure sensing, and consumer applications for low g inertial devices.  Part of the reason for this is that these devices use more mature MEMS technology.  As is often the case, different sensor/actuator applications using MEMS will use different MEMS process flows.  Therefore, several new applications are still on the early stage of the learning curve for a new MEMS process: e.g., RF MEMS, optical MEMS, BioMEMS.  However, once the process technology is more mature, these will also be ripe new market areas for MEMS.

MIJ: RF MEMS have seen much attention recently.  How close do think the industry is to replacing some of the current RF circuits with RF MEMS? 

DM: We have little work ongoing in the Freescale product groups on RF MEMS.  There has been some work in the past on RF MEMS in our R&D organization.  They would probably be a more appropriate source of information for this question. 

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