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Technology

Micromachines in Modern Use 75

Posted by michael from the little-engine-that-could dept.
dragons_flight writes: "Physics Today has a lengthy article on MEMS (microelectromechanical systems AKA micromachines) including the ways they are being put to use right now. Uses include airbag collision detectors in cars, pressure guages, "micro-microphones", video projection, scientific equipment, and the ever popular optical switching technology. In addition there are two brief sidebars discussing how micro- and macro-machines differ and the use of integrated circuit technology to build MEMS."
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Micromachines in Modern Use More

Micromachines in Modern Use

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  • Uses include airbag collision detectors in cars, pressure guages, "micro-microphones", video projection, scientific equipment, and the ever popular optical switching technology.

    Wow, talk about advanced technology! If they can put all this stuff in a toy car the size of my thumbnail, imagine what they can put in, say, a Matchbox racer! Or, dare I say it... A Tonka truck!

  • cool (Score:3, Funny)

    by CodeMonky ( 10675 ) on Saturday October 06, 2001 @05:06PM (#2396120) Homepage
    do they have a commercial with that guy talking really really fast?

    oh wait, i think that is a different micromachines. Nevermind.
    • > that is a different micromachines

      Will it surprise anybody when some toy/entertainment corporation makes
      this scientific endeavor stop using
      their trademarked name? Or puts a
      stop to the research altogether with
      some huge lawsuit? Preposterous? Really?

  • Adaptive Optics (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lanclos ( 150352 )
    MEMS also has a bright future in Adaptive Optics [ucolick.org], for both astronomy and vision sciences.

    AO for the next generation of extremely large telescopes requires something like 500k to 1,000k actuators, something that is only economically feasible with something like MEMS.
    • Whelp, if I had read the article all the way, through, I would have noticed that the writer said pretty much exactly what I did, with exactly the same link. Oops.

      I encourage interested folks to browse the CfAO web site. They've got pointers to all manner of AO research nation-wide, including several active projects on MEMS. The focus of the last AO summer school was almost entirely MEMS.
    • They are also ideal for cryogenically cooled AO systems (which I'm working on). Due to the small size, it's much easier and cheaper to cool them. Generally, MEMS mirrors are also composed of only one or two materials, so coefficient of thermal expansion mis-match problems are also reduced.

      See here [dur.ac.uk] for a longer description.

  • MEMS "Smart Dust" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Spootnik ( 518145 ) on Saturday October 06, 2001 @05:11PM (#2396132)
    I just attended a conference last week where a scientist from UC/Berkeley presented his current work on 'smartDust' which is a microelectromechanical system project to design exactly such critters. They're currently shooting for a 1 cubic millimeter final device. The little mote contains a power supply, transceiver, sensors and actuators. Pretty amazing stuff at the interface between science fiction and current research.

    • Re:MEMS "Smart Dust" (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A new breed of dust that can avoid brooms? Thanks, but I prefer my dust to stay dumb.
    • I'd like to see the video projection technology. Displays are nice and all but I want a projector that I can stick in my pocket or a little cube I hook on to a PDA. I'm getting real tired moving a 40-inch plasma TV from room to room for management meetings. Micro-microphones would be cool too, just mix them into a can of paint and cover the office with them. That would be cool.
  • A fun new type of game out by EA deals heavily with MEMS, and actually has a lot of relavent info (along with a lot of stuff created for the game.) Check it out at Majestic's [majesticthegame.com] website.

    -Berj
  • There is a lot of cool work being done in using MEMS. Its got to do with the "pervasive computing" buzzword. Essentially, these guys [http] are building sensor cubes of 1 cubic mm volume that can be deployed in diverse fields ranging from collecting meteorological data (say, throwing them into a tornado, a la Twister!), or for being used in huge farms where soil conditions can be studied in different portions of the farm. Incidentally, these cubes have a pretty catchy name too "Smart Dust", and are complete with photodetectors, transmitters and a solar cell to boot

    Their work also deals with some of the important issues in deploying MEMS, like how would you be able to empower these minute thingies with networking capabilities? Could probably have minute radio transmitters built on to these things that transmit data periodically. Another important issue is optimal power management. Obviously these sensors can't last for a long time, so the power management features on them must be state-of-the-art. Unfortunately, no references to their work: all very hush-hush and privy to IEEE members.
  • Okay, please post all your references to the old tiny toy cars known as "Micro Machines" under this thread, so the rest of us won't have to wade through 100 redundant messages from people who think they're the first person who thought of drawing that connection.
  • From the article description: Uses include airbag collision detectors, ...

    Amazing! You'd think they'd fasten those airbags down securely, but it's nice to know that if a couple of them ever got loose, we'll be able to detect when those airbags collide! ;^)

  • What excites me about MEMs is this: Bio-emplants I want wireless communication device installed in my scull, I want the display for it on a heads up display projected on bio-optics installed over my cornea. And I want it to be able to do more then that. Wait a minute... not if they are going to make me install a GPS transponder... and there has to be some kind of failsafe so when i am sleeping i don't broadcast my horrible little cinemas to ex-girlfriends... no.

  • Micro-microphones? (Score:3, Funny)

    by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Saturday October 06, 2001 @05:53PM (#2396216) Homepage Journal
    10^-6×10^-6 phones = 10^-12 phones

    Surely you mean picophones!

  • tiny little machines don't break apart in all of these new fangled applications...

    On another note, I hope they are careful and don't release dangerous micromachines that would eat up a city.

  • Crypto! (Score:2, Funny)

    by gimmie_prozac ( 525455 )
    We need to port crypto apps to these MEMS devices, because given our culture of ubiquitous surveillance, it's just a matter of time before someone starts snooping on the data in the micromachines operating my computerized knee brace. Next thing you know, my inbox is filled with spam from physical therapists and asprin companies...

  • It's a good article.

    I like the part near the end where he said that we now take for granted microprocessors containing tens of millions of transistors. It's the kind of thing that makes you (or at least me) respect everything that goes into these damn computers. Oh yeah, and it gives you some idea of the vast waste in the name of time-to-market and whatnot. Back in the days, computers that didn't have nearly as much power as today performed many functions very quickly and efficiently. Nowadays, computers that are a hundred times faster and better do everything a hundred times slower because many of today's programs don't contain good algorithms, don't contain good data structures, and do contain a shitload of flow control statements that can be eliminated by doing a few math instructions or replaced by a small look up table. This isn't the programmer's fault by the way. There are many clever programmers out there who do amazing things, but unfortunately, the damn suits don't let them do their jobs. And furthermore, they are few and far between when compared to the overflowing numbers of script kiddies who write shit code that unfortunately makes it into "products" because companies care more about their bottom line than the quality of their work. To suits, the most important part of their product (in other words, the technical part, whether it is a 400 pound cast-iron cylinder or a floppy diskette containing program instructions) is nothing but a bunch of pesky details they'd rather didn't exist. Furthermore, they have no respect for the programmer (or any other employee for that matter, but I think programmers are looked down upon by many of these suits). When an engineer says it'll take a year to build a bridge, suits will believe it. When a clever programmer says it'll take a year to build a complicated program, the suits think you're out of your mind for coming up with that (very realistic) number--when they're the ones out of their minds for coming up with the ridiculous idea in the first place. Programmers would rather do interesting things with their knowledge and skills. Unfortunately, suits ask their programmers to make boring shit instead, and then don't even respect the thought and brain-breaking work that goes into it. After all, how hard could it be to bang together some sequences of instructions? Hey, if the suit's 8-year-old kid can put together a stupid website in ten minutes, why can't a complicated software project get completed in two weeks or so? Well, however long it takes, it's unacceptable. So instead of hiring the clever programmer wearing the T-shirt (the one who estimated a very realistic year), we'll hire those script kiddies wearing the suits. Their professional estimate for the work is two business days.

    And the worst part is when they (the suits) write their stupid fscking press releases or whatever they are, which contain a proliferation of words like "innovative", "enterprise", "collaboration", etc. They'll market printf() as, for example, a compelling enterprise architecture leveraging innovative platforms and streamlining leading edge technology solutions to content providers. All of which means absolutely nothing. On a glossy brochure. That is what I call taking tens of millions of transistors for granted. It's not the programmers' faults. It's the suits who don't care's faults. (Yeah, there are suits out there who do care. But the ratio of suits who do care to suits who's damns they give (give damns?) only to the bottom line must be like 1:9999999999999999999999999999) It pisses me off just to think about the sorry state of things. I believe the suits caused the dot-bomb crash. The programmers (not the script-kiddies) were just trying to do their jobs. The suits frieked out because the work took more than five minutes to complete. Crash. End of story.

    P.S., this was not intended as a troll.

    • I also believe the suits caused the dot-bomb crash. Afterall, if it wasn't for them none of those stupid companies (and the select few good ones) would have been in a position to crash in the first place.

      I'm going to sell furniture on the internet. No, we don't deliver -- costs too much to do that. No, you can't sit on it first to see if it's comfortable. Yes, it comes in many colours.

      What? We need a warehouse -- but it's virtual why would we need a warehouse?
  • Does that guy who talks really fast still sell them? He said they're smaller than a nut ("this one or that one").
  • I don't think so, although someone with more experience with MEMS can correct me here. Anything in italics is cut and pasted from the main article:

    Rerouting light with MEMS switches not only breaks the electronic bottleneck, it has many other advantages as well.

    These mirrors flip up and down mechanically, right? That can't be much faster than KHz, whereas electronics switch on the order of MHz, I thought...

    It is data rate independent in the sense that a mirror's behavior is independent of how fast the light turns on and off. Likewise, a mirror's behavior is wavelength independent.

    Hmmm... seems to me that the faster the light turns on and off, the wider the bandwidth of the signal. I don't know if this is a big effect compared with the wavelength sensitivity of the mirror, but then they go and claim that mirrors are wavelength insensitive. Perhaps regular mirrors are, but aren't high reflectivity mirrors wavelength sensitive (using interference effects from thin film coatings)? If they didn't use high reflectivity mirrors, wouldn't there be a huge loss to this switch?

    This is just me asking more questions than I'm answering, I realize, but maybe somebody who's been in the field of photonics longer than I can provide some answers. Are there any companies currently using MEMS in commercial systems?
    • These mirrors flip up and down mechanically, right? That can't be much faster than KHz, whereas electronics switch on the order of MHz, I thought...

      You could move a macroscopic mirror at a few kHz. Mirrors fabricated to be a few microns across can be switched much, much more quickly.

      Even if your packet rate still ends up being much faster than the speed at which you can switch the mirror, you could still use this to eliminate a lot of decoding during routing. Instead of a box with N network attachments that decodes incoming traffic and sends it to x, y, or z destination as appropriate, you have a MEMS box that has one connection pattern for the first millisecond, another connection pattern for the next millisecond, and so on. If the routers generating the traffic are intelligent, they can group packets for a given destination into bursts so that they're routed automatically through the optical MEMS router. Alternatively, you could group packets and put a duration and a destination-identifier tag on it at a lower data rate. Embedded electronics in the MEMS chip can read the destination and move the mirror to the correct position for the duration of the burst of packets.

      This won't eliminate the need for all electronic processing, but it will make several aspects of routing at high data rates much easier.

      but then they go and claim that mirrors are wavelength insensitive. Perhaps regular mirrors are, but aren't high reflectivity mirrors wavelength sensitive (using interference effects from thin film coatings)? If they didn't use high reflectivity mirrors, wouldn't there be a huge loss to this switch?

      Not really. You can always put an optical repeater (read: erbium-doped fiber laser) on all outgoing ports to compensate for dimming. You have to do this on long fiber runs anyways.

      Good thought, though.
    • Actually many of the devices are SWITCHES not ROUTERS. This make a big difference.

      Routers (Cisco) make routing decisions on a per-packet basis, unless they are using MPLS.

      Switches (Lucent, Nortel) create connections that are up for the length of the communication (if not longer). The entire message takes the same path -- no decisions, or mirror-flipping, necessary other than at setup.

      The optical switches make good sense at aggregate points, where large amounts of traffic are forwarded. MAE points; big cities; etc. are great for this. Lucent's customers use them for trans-oceanic and trans-continental routing of LARGE amounts of data (800 Gbps - 1.6 Tbps).

      In Lucent's devices (MEMS mirrors on a chip), there is a mirror per wavelength (256 total per MEMS chip).

      Charles E. Hill
      Core Network Engineer
      Lucent Worldwide Services

  • US and European efforts on micromanipulation (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Micromanipulation (in order to assemble micromachines) looks to be the future. See for example

    The Nanowalker [mit.edu] project

    The MINIMAN [ira.uka.de] project


  • remember the joke back in highschool when someone would ask you:

    "does your dick say 'micro machine'" on it?

    and you were supposed to say "no it doesnt!"

    and he would say "then it's not the real thing!"
  • I don't want MicroMachines. I want the regular size Hot Wheels. Well, actually, I don't want the cars, we're drowning in them, I want track. The 2 lane grey type that comes with the "Hot Wheels World" playsets. I need a lot more straight pieces, but Mattel doesn't sell that kind of track separately, you have to buy a set with some stupid building and there's always too many curves and not enough straights. And definitely not enough 45 and 30 degree curves and 4 way intersections and overpass supports and stuff like that. I want better buildings too. I guess what I really want is the facilities to manufacture my own plastic stuff. This is what happens when you have a nephew who thinks that you exist primarily to be one of his main playmates, your own childhood comes back to repossess you. And you get G.I. Joes and those Dragon brand cop figures for Christmas and your birthday. Have to keep all those at his house 'cause ours is full of Hot Wheels.

    Yes I know all this is ridiculously off-topic, but maybe somebody knows where I can get some of that track. (Or a cheap injection molding system, with complete instructions.)

  • Hey, in all seriousness, since these MEMS would be able to build real-world objects on a much smaller scale, wouldn't it be feasible to have a micro machine that actually worked? It'd be cool to have a little toy RX-7, guided by an internal computer, to go around that track by itself at speeds normally unknown to a small pewter car.

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