Slashdot Mirror
Micromachines in Modern Use
dragons_flight writes: "Physics Today has a lengthy article on MEMS (microelectromechanical systems AKA micromachines) including the ways they are being put to use right now. Uses include airbag collision detectors in cars, pressure guages, "micro-microphones", video projection, scientific equipment, and the ever popular optical switching technology. In addition there are two brief sidebars discussing how micro- and macro-machines differ and the use of integrated circuit technology to build MEMS."
Uses include airbag collision detectors in cars, pressure guages, "micro-microphones", video projection, scientific equipment, and the ever popular optical switching technology.
Wow, talk about advanced technology! If they can put all this stuff in a toy car the size of my thumbnail, imagine what they can put in, say, a Matchbox racer! Or, dare I say it... A Tonka truck!
do they have a commercial with that guy talking really really fast?
oh wait, i think that is a different micromachines. Nevermind.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
MEMS also has a bright future in Adaptive Optics, for both astronomy and vision sciences.
AO for the next generation of extremely large telescopes requires something like 500k to 1,000k actuators, something that is only economically feasible with something like MEMS.
I just attended a conference last week where a scientist from UC/Berkeley presented his current work on 'smartDust' which is a microelectromechanical system project to design exactly such critters. They're currently shooting for a 1 cubic millimeter final device. The little mote contains a power supply, transceiver, sensors and actuators. Pretty amazing stuff at the interface between science fiction and current research.
A fun new type of game out by EA deals heavily with MEMS, and actually has a lot of relavent info (along with a lot of stuff created for the game.) Check it out at Majestic's website.
-Berj
There is a lot of cool work being done in using MEMS. Its got to do with the "pervasive computing" buzzword. Essentially, these guys are building sensor cubes of 1 cubic mm volume that can be deployed in diverse fields ranging from collecting meteorological data (say, throwing them into a tornado, a la Twister!), or for being used in huge farms where soil conditions can be studied in different portions of the farm. Incidentally, these cubes have a pretty catchy name too "Smart Dust", and are complete with photodetectors, transmitters and a solar cell to boot
Their work also deals with some of the important issues in deploying MEMS, like how would you be able to empower these minute thingies with networking capabilities? Could probably have minute radio transmitters built on to these things that transmit data periodically. Another important issue is optimal power management. Obviously these sensors can't last for a long time, so the power management features on them must be state-of-the-art. Unfortunately, no references to their work: all very hush-hush and privy to IEEE members.
Okay, please post all your references to the old tiny toy cars known as "Micro Machines" under this thread, so the rest of us won't have to wade through 100 redundant messages from people who think they're the first person who thought of drawing that connection.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Thank you, Slashcode, for putting links in brackets by default now.
Amazing! You'd think they'd fasten those airbags down securely, but it's nice to know that if a couple of them ever got loose, we'll be able to detect when those airbags collide! ;^)
What excites me about MEMs is this: Bio-emplants I want wireless communication device installed in my scull, I want the display for it on a heads up display projected on bio-optics installed over my cornea. And I want it to be able to do more then that. Wait a minute... not if they are going to make me install a GPS transponder... and there has to be some kind of failsafe so when i am sleeping i don't broadcast my horrible little cinemas to ex-girlfriends... no.
Surely you mean picophones!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
On another note, I hope they are careful and don't release dangerous micromachines that would eat up a city.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
We need to port crypto apps to these MEMS devices, because given our culture of ubiquitous surveillance, it's just a matter of time before someone starts snooping on the data in the micromachines operating my computerized knee brace. Next thing you know, my inbox is filled with spam from physical therapists and asprin companies...
It's a good article.
I like the part near the end where he said that we now take for granted microprocessors containing tens of millions of transistors. It's the kind of thing that makes you (or at least me) respect everything that goes into these damn computers. Oh yeah, and it gives you some idea of the vast waste in the name of time-to-market and whatnot. Back in the days, computers that didn't have nearly as much power as today performed many functions very quickly and efficiently. Nowadays, computers that are a hundred times faster and better do everything a hundred times slower because many of today's programs don't contain good algorithms, don't contain good data structures, and do contain a shitload of flow control statements that can be eliminated by doing a few math instructions or replaced by a small look up table. This isn't the programmer's fault by the way. There are many clever programmers out there who do amazing things, but unfortunately, the damn suits don't let them do their jobs. And furthermore, they are few and far between when compared to the overflowing numbers of script kiddies who write shit code that unfortunately makes it into "products" because companies care more about their bottom line than the quality of their work. To suits, the most important part of their product (in other words, the technical part, whether it is a 400 pound cast-iron cylinder or a floppy diskette containing program instructions) is nothing but a bunch of pesky details they'd rather didn't exist. Furthermore, they have no respect for the programmer (or any other employee for that matter, but I think programmers are looked down upon by many of these suits). When an engineer says it'll take a year to build a bridge, suits will believe it. When a clever programmer says it'll take a year to build a complicated program, the suits think you're out of your mind for coming up with that (very realistic) number--when they're the ones out of their minds for coming up with the ridiculous idea in the first place. Programmers would rather do interesting things with their knowledge and skills. Unfortunately, suits ask their programmers to make boring shit instead, and then don't even respect the thought and brain-breaking work that goes into it. After all, how hard could it be to bang together some sequences of instructions? Hey, if the suit's 8-year-old kid can put together a stupid website in ten minutes, why can't a complicated software project get completed in two weeks or so? Well, however long it takes, it's unacceptable. So instead of hiring the clever programmer wearing the T-shirt (the one who estimated a very realistic year), we'll hire those script kiddies wearing the suits. Their professional estimate for the work is two business days.
And the worst part is when they (the suits) write their stupid fscking press releases or whatever they are, which contain a proliferation of words like "innovative", "enterprise", "collaboration", etc. They'll market printf() as, for example, a compelling enterprise architecture leveraging innovative platforms and streamlining leading edge technology solutions to content providers. All of which means absolutely nothing. On a glossy brochure. That is what I call taking tens of millions of transistors for granted. It's not the programmers' faults. It's the suits who don't care's faults. (Yeah, there are suits out there who do care. But the ratio of suits who do care to suits who's damns they give (give damns?) only to the bottom line must be like 1:9999999999999999999999999999) It pisses me off just to think about the sorry state of things. I believe the suits caused the dot-bomb crash. The programmers (not the script-kiddies) were just trying to do their jobs. The suits frieked out because the work took more than five minutes to complete. Crash. End of story.
P.S., this was not intended as a troll.
Does that guy who talks really fast still sell them? He said they're smaller than a nut ("this one or that one").
AC's cheerfully ignored
I don't think so, although someone with more experience with MEMS can correct me here. Anything in italics is cut and pasted from the main article:
Rerouting light with MEMS switches not only breaks the electronic bottleneck, it has many other advantages as well.
These mirrors flip up and down mechanically, right? That can't be much faster than KHz, whereas electronics switch on the order of MHz, I thought...
It is data rate independent in the sense that a mirror's behavior is independent of how fast the light turns on and off. Likewise, a mirror's behavior is wavelength independent.
Hmmm... seems to me that the faster the light turns on and off, the wider the bandwidth of the signal. I don't know if this is a big effect compared with the wavelength sensitivity of the mirror, but then they go and claim that mirrors are wavelength insensitive. Perhaps regular mirrors are, but aren't high reflectivity mirrors wavelength sensitive (using interference effects from thin film coatings)? If they didn't use high reflectivity mirrors, wouldn't there be a huge loss to this switch?
This is just me asking more questions than I'm answering, I realize, but maybe somebody who's been in the field of photonics longer than I can provide some answers. Are there any companies currently using MEMS in commercial systems?
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
The Nanowalker project
The MINIMAN project
You can't blame the suits entirely.
At least they tend not to go around giving employees $1k for a fscking *CHAIR*.
Sit yer rear down on a gods-damned stool, you spoiled asses.
remember the joke back in highschool when someone would ask you:
"does your dick say 'micro machine'" on it?
and you were supposed to say "no it doesnt!"
and he would say "then it's not the real thing!"
my blog
A company I used to work for made HDD suspension arms. They were starting to use MEMS to give the arm finer resolution on the HDD. Pretty cool stuff.
I believe they were going to be able to double or triple the accuracy that the arm could obtain. As long the read/write head can read and write the tracks that close together HDD capacity will continue to rise. Although I am not sure of the electromagnetic effects at that small a scale.
WARM BAWLS
Micromachined RFID Tags is implanted in every product Wal/K-mart sells.
Yes I know all this is ridiculously off-topic, but maybe somebody knows where I can get some of that track. (Or a cheap injection molding system, with complete instructions.)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Hey, in all seriousness, since these MEMS would be able to build real-world objects on a much smaller scale, wouldn't it be feasible to have a micro machine that actually worked? It'd be cool to have a little toy RX-7, guided by an internal computer, to go around that track by itself at speeds normally unknown to a small pewter car.
-1, Disagree is not a valid option. Troll, Flamebait and Offtopic are not a substitute.