Sandia Builds Micromechanical 'Device Driver'

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."

Comments

Reliability?

[Rebel Patriot]

I'm not terribly well informed on how these things work on chips currently. How much smaller will chips really become if you were to put several shafts to such a chain? And just how reliable would would of these chains be when hooked to multiple shafts? A friend of mine told me once that the chains weren't currently put on multiple shafts because they wouldn't handle the stress, so is this smaller chain really going to make chips smaller?

Disclaimer. I could be completely wrong on everything here. I am ignorant of circuitry.