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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."
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.
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