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

How are these made?

[PoiBoy]

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?

Re:How are these made?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is actualy quite easy, the gears that you see in the pictures are made out of poly silicon. So what you do it grow a thick (several micron) sacrificial oxide, pattern the oxide using standard lithography. Etch out the pattern of the gears, creating essentaly a mold of the gear. Then you backfill the area with poly silicon. You then preform a oxide etch with a HF acid solution and remove the oxide, leaving just the poly silicon gears. You grow the oxide, etch, fill, and repeat. This process is done several times to created diffrent levels. So as an example, the bottom of the chain would be layer 1. The Drive gear and the vertical post that connect the top and bottom of the chain are layer 2. Then the top of the chain is layer 3.

Re:How are these made?

[SirSlud]

AC's are strictly forbidden from making informing posts. Don't you know that? ;)

Re:How are these made?

[Arjuna Theban]

They can be actuated with a bunch of different methods. The easiest is a comb drive. I'll let you read up on it. As for how they are made: Most gear-like structures are built with "surface micromachining" ie: building up on silicon with SiO2, polysilicon, metal, various epoxies like SU-8 etc. There is, however, another way to build many structures too, it is bulk micromachining. In bulk micromachining, the device is built on a single crystal silicon, that is, by etching into the silicon and having the body of your machine be the silicon you started with (and of course the other various materials I said before). For all of you who wonder how bulk micromachining works, I suggest you check out Berkeley's "Single Crystal Reactive Etching and Metallization" (SCREAM) process.

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flap, flap, flap

[BrianGa]

Can I stick a baseball card on it, and hear the racket? All the neighborhood geeks will be so jealous...Hey, this Mickey Mantle isn't worth anything, is it?

Before you get too excited...

[Thagg]

The application that Sandia has given, at least in the past, for their micromachine efforts is better locks for nuclear warheads. So, the analogy that the article makes to sewing machine factories only makes sense if they were nuclear sewing machines.

thad

Article on MEMS research

[Stone Rhino]

here (free regblah.)
AND for cut and pasters: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/10/technology/circu its/10NEXT.html

finally

[Gavitron_zero]

this is great news for the little computer elves that do all the calculations in my computer. They've been slaving away on their abicii for years, now i can buy them bicycles with nano-chains and stuff!

Possible Use...

[alfredw]

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?)

Coming soon

[SaturnTim]

The Ultra-micro-featherweight class of robot wars! (Or battlebots, or robotica, or whatever)

--T

Now, a teeeny tiny WD-40 can

[simetra]

will be necessary to keep it from gunking up.

Applications

[Alien54]

I don't know. I have these visions of incredibly tiny bicycle messengers pedalling around the CPU delivery urgeant page fault messages.

or going in circles shouting "Kernel Panic" or something.

Just an image. Tron with bicyles ;-)

New computer fans!

[nizo]

Now instead of one big honkin noisy fan, we can have the same noisy motor drive zillions of lil itty bitty fans (imagine if every little vent hole in your computer had a fan in it wheeeeee). Or maybe a huge wall full of these, would be safer to stick your finger into that then a big cut-your-finger-off fan.

Forget the chains...

[AJWM]

Just look at those gears. Man, with technology like that we can finally reduce Babbage's Analytical Engine to something that'll fit on a chip.

Now that's a microcomputer!

The second law stops you hot

[MarkusQ]

Consider hooking this thing up to a Brownian Ratchet, such as discribed by Feynman in his lectures

The Brownian Ratchet you describe won't work, because of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law is potent enough that even evoking Feynman's name won't make it go away. Besides, what Feynman described was why this won't work.

See Chapter 46 of the Lectures if you want the details, but in short, it would quickly get hot enough that its own shaking (heat=random motion remember?) would drown out the Brownian motion.

-- MarkusQ

Re:like what?

[Drake42]

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!