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."

Comments

Micromachines

[Guido del Confuso]

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!

cool

[CodeMonky]

do they have a commercial with that guy talking really really fast?

oh wait, i think that is a different micromachines. Nevermind.

Re:cool

[fishbowl]

> that is a different micromachines

Will it surprise anybody when some toy/entertainment corporation makes
this scientific endeavor stop using
their trademarked name? Or puts a
stop to the research altogether with
some huge lawsuit? Preposterous? Really?

Adaptive Optics

[lanclos]

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.

MEMS "Smart Dust"

[Spootnik]

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.

Re:MEMS "Smart Dust"

[Quizme2000]

I'd like to see the video projection technology. Displays are nice and all but I want a projector that I can stick in my pocket or a little cube I hook on to a PDA. I'm getting real tired moving a 40-inch plasma TV from room to room for management meetings. Micro-microphones would be cool too, just mix them into a can of paint and cover the office with them. That would be cool.

Redundant consolidation

[Mike Schiraldi]

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.

Uses we never dreamed of

[martyb]

From the article description: Uses include airbag collision detectors, ...

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! ;^)

Re:Uses we never dreamed of

[unitron]

When two airbags collide, do either of them sustain injuries or do they serve as each other's airbag?

what i would like to see..

[motherhead]

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.

Micro-microphones?

[TeknoHog]

10^-6×10^-6 phones = 10^-12 phones

Surely you mean picophones!

It's a wonder that these

[Schwarzchild]

tiny little machines don't break apart in all of these new fangled applications...

On another note, I hope they are careful and don't release dangerous micromachines that would eat up a city.

Crypto!

[gimmie_prozac]

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...

MEMS to solve all our optical swithing needs?

[peter_gzowski]

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?

Re:MEMS to solve all our optical swithing needs?

[Christopher Thomas]

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...

You could move a macroscopic mirror at a few kHz. Mirrors fabricated to be a few microns across can be switched much, much more quickly.

Even if your packet rate still ends up being much faster than the speed at which you can switch the mirror, you could still use this to eliminate a lot of decoding during routing. Instead of a box with N network attachments that decodes incoming traffic and sends it to x, y, or z destination as appropriate, you have a MEMS box that has one connection pattern for the first millisecond, another connection pattern for the next millisecond, and so on. If the routers generating the traffic are intelligent, they can group packets for a given destination into bursts so that they're routed automatically through the optical MEMS router. Alternatively, you could group packets and put a duration and a destination-identifier tag on it at a lower data rate. Embedded electronics in the MEMS chip can read the destination and move the mirror to the correct position for the duration of the burst of packets.

This won't eliminate the need for all electronic processing, but it will make several aspects of routing at high data rates much easier.

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?

Not really. You can always put an optical repeater (read: erbium-doped fiber laser) on all outgoing ports to compensate for dimming. You have to do this on long fiber runs anyways.

Good thought, though.

Re:MEMS to solve all our optical swithing needs?

[chill]

Actually many of the devices are SWITCHES not ROUTERS. This make a big difference.

Routers (Cisco) make routing decisions on a per-packet basis, unless they are using MPLS.

Switches (Lucent, Nortel) create connections that are up for the length of the communication (if not longer). The entire message takes the same path -- no decisions, or mirror-flipping, necessary other than at setup.

The optical switches make good sense at aggregate points, where large amounts of traffic are forwarded. MAE points; big cities; etc. are great for this. Lucent's customers use them for trans-oceanic and trans-continental routing of LARGE amounts of data (800 Gbps - 1.6 Tbps).

In Lucent's devices (MEMS mirrors on a chip), there is a mirror per wavelength (256 total per MEMS chip).

Charles E. Hill
Core Network Engineer
Lucent Worldwide Services

Re:Well written article.

[rtaylor]

I also believe the suits caused the dot-bomb crash. Afterall, if it wasn't for them none of those stupid companies (and the select few good ones) would have been in a position to crash in the first place.

I'm going to sell furniture on the internet. No, we don't deliver -- costs too much to do that. No, you can't sit on it first to see if it's comfortable. Yes, it comes in many colours.

What? We need a warehouse -- but it's virtual why would we need a warehouse?

I don't want MicroMachines

[unitron]

I don't want MicroMachines. I want the regular size Hot Wheels. Well, actually, I don't want the cars, we're drowning in them, I want track. The 2 lane grey type that comes with the "Hot Wheels World" playsets. I need a lot more straight pieces, but Mattel doesn't sell that kind of track separately, you have to buy a set with some stupid building and there's always too many curves and not enough straights. And definitely not enough 45 and 30 degree curves and 4 way intersections and overpass supports and stuff like that. I want better buildings too. I guess what I really want is the facilities to manufacture my own plastic stuff. This is what happens when you have a nephew who thinks that you exist primarily to be one of his main playmates, your own childhood comes back to repossess you. And you get G.I. Joes and those Dragon brand cop figures for Christmas and your birthday. Have to keep all those at his house 'cause ours is full of Hot Wheels.

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.)