Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sandia Builds Micromechanical 'Device Driver'

Posted by michael on from the working-on-the-chain-gang dept.

DanielRavenNest writes: "Sandia Labs has built a tiny bicycle chain type drive out of silicon. This allows one micromechanical motor to drive multiple devices scattered about a chip."

5 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. How are these made? by PoiBoy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Other than that this stuff is made out of silicon, I don't know much about these devices. Are they etched like integrated circuits? And here's what baffles me...If they're etched, how in the heck can they actually make gears and stuff spin and move around?

    --
    Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
  2. like what? by MediumWare · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Many people are talking about lots of uses for this thing, but nothing yet struck me as in: "yeah, if it can do this, it will really make a difference"... any examples?

    1. Re:like what? by Drake42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Microscopic device that you eat. It swims around in you like a submarine, communicates by tiny radio waves, can even take grainy, tech looking pictures to show doctors whats going on in side you.

      Tiny little bot with one of those chem detectors. Attach it to a tiny bit of iron. It floats around in a solution and when it finds a molecule of the type you're looking for it grabs ahold. Now you can seperate two things that were presumably not seperable before.

      Tiny machine that traces around circuits that have gone defective and actually repairs them through some magic. The little devices follow the paths until they come to a problem they can repair.

      My personal goal device actually has nothing to do with chains, but is a microscopic audio recorder that becomes permanently attached to your ear. It records everything you hear giving you perfect memory! Powered by body heat so you don't switch batteries, no bulky tapes, saves the data to disk at the end of the day. Suddenly my bad memory is no longer a handicap!

  3. Possible Use... by alfredw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Consider hooking this thing up to a Brownian Ratchet, such as discribed by Feynman in his lectures. (For those not familiar with a Brownian Ratchet, this page give a good introduction and a cool Java thingy to play with. See also R.D. Astumian: Thermodynamics and Kinetics of a Brownian Motor, Science 276, p. 917-922 (1997). Essentially, it works like a very small, normal ratchet. Molecules in the atmosphere hit the system randomly. Sometimes it goes "forward," but it cannot go against the ratcheting mechanism - "backwards" is locked out. So you get a net forward motion on the ratchet essentially for free from the atmosphere.)

    Connect the Brownian Ratchet to this little chain thingy. Have it wind something up. User presses button, and thingy unwinds. Basically a free recharging system.

    Not all that practical, but pretty cool. I'm sure there are better applications... (anyone?)

    --
    In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
  4. Reliability is different for small things by Richard+Kirk · · Score: 2, Interesting
    A lot of the fatigue and wear problems we see on macroscopic devices are not problems with the bulk material, but problems with faults, inclusions, grain boundaries, and things like that. Every time you turn a real bike chain, the teeth will scrape off a few atoms, a dislocation may move by a small amount, a fatigue crack may get one atom deeper.

    These little gadgets are so small that it is possible to make them out of a single, faultless piece of material. Okay, if you had a dislocation or an inclusion in your bike chain, then it would fail pretty quickly, if it worked at all; but if you get a good one, then it will seem almost immortal when compared to macroscopic objects. So, you make a few spares, and throw away the duds.

    We are used to seeing silicon and silicon dioxide as crystalline. However, if you take out the small features that allow a crack to propagate through a crystal, then these materials can seem very tough and flexible. Think of glass fibres and glass. The Sandia site used to have a downloadable video of a minature moving mirror getting trodden on by a flea: it bends but does not crumple, and springs back unharmed.

    There are other changes as you get to submicron sizes. Surface tension and other chemical effects seem huge. Water drops seem to have a tough skin on them at this scale, and drops will sit on a surface rather than wet it. This is just as well: a water drop could glue the chain together if it could wet. As things are, these gadgets seem to survive in the open atmosphere just fine.

    If you think that is weird, the nanoscale stuff is much weirder. Interesting times, or what?