How to corner the MEMS market
As the United States seeks to reinvigorate its job market and move past economic recession, MIT News examines manufacturing’s role in the country’s economic future through this series on work at the Institute around manufacturing.In the last decade, MEMS (microelectromechanical devices) have wrought revolutions in several industries: Arrays of micromirrors, for instance, enabled digital film projectors, and accelerometers like those in Microsoft’s Wii controller have changed gaming. But commercially successful MEMS represent a tiny sampling of the prototypes developed in academic and industry labs — from supersensitive biological sensors to films that can turn any surface into a loudspeaker to devices that harvest energy from motion.The problem is that most current MEMS are built using the same techniques used to produce computer chips, and those techniques are expensive. “Over the past 20 or 30 years, the cost of a tool that performs a specific function in a semiconductor manufacturing plant...