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MicroElectroMechanical Systems in Review

Posted by michael on from the plenty-of-room-at-the-bottom dept.

jscribner writes: "Tis the season for tech forecasts and wrap-ups; I got to post this discussion on www.research.ibm.com; it's about how (merely 30 years after Feynman's speech) nanotechnology is finally being applied to chip and storage technologies. The IBM Research article covers RF (Radio Frequency) MEMS, micro-actuator MEMS, and the Millipede project. You can also find some interesting material on IDA's MEMS site and the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems."

3 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. Better disks vs. cool technology by d5w · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I thought it was a nice arrangement in the article, having the last two sections of the article be about
    1. A cool, novel technology with tiny cantilevered sensor/writer tips over a polymer surface giving amazing data density, and
    2. An incremental improvement in magnetic disks giving finer control over the head positioning.
    Given the history of storage technologies, what odds does anyone here want to give to the commercial success of Millipede vs. magnetic micro-drives, even in small consumer applications that currently use flash?
  2. Re:Applications by dgou · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Moving one atom/electron at a time is quite precise, but also very very slow to assemble any quantity of anything interesting. My personal guess is that these devices will first achieve practical application using some kind of massively parallel assembly mechanism that is chemical rather than mechanical. Either vacuum chamber deposition or perhaps some kind of repeated bathings of various soupy mixtures. Having nanobots roam the surface of a chip and create the circuitry is interesting, but potentially slow. Better to have 'em swarm over a finished board/chip and tweak/disable the brokey parts.

    "Control, control... You must learn control!"

  3. Mesoscopic vs. Nanoscopic by Doctor+K · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The comments I've seen all seem oriented to nanoscopic devices. That technology is still in blue sky phase (lots of potential, but nobody really knows what to do with it and it is still not practical for large scale manufacturing). Mesoscopic MEMs (devices on the order of microns in size instead of angstroms) are already used in commerical products. In fact, chances are, you already own a few and didn't even know it.

    Here is an article with some details oriented towards mesoscopic MEMs.

    Here is a neat picture of a Mesoscopic MEMs device.

    (Bias warning: the supervisor of my research group was co-author of this article.)

    Kevin