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MEMS @ 40

IEEE Spectrum dives into its archives to look at the people, technologies, and applications that have been powering a revolution in microelectricalmechanical systems—MEMS

In 1984, a group of researchers exploring unusual devices etched from silicon wafers convened at a beachside resort in South Carolina. With toes scrunching sand—the raw source of the semiconducting element at the center of their work—they established a new category of solid-state devices that would soon become known as “microelectromechanical systems” or “MEMS.”

Over the decades, their Hilton Head Solid-State Sensors, Actuators & Microsystems Workshop evolved into the premier academic MEMS conference in North America, with graduate students vying for the honor of capturing one of the limited speaking slots. Many of the MEMS technologies essential to now-ubiquitous products like inkjet printers, automobile safety sensors, microphones, infrared cameras, motion sensors, ultrasound probes, medical implants, and RF filters for wireless communication debuted at the Hilton Head workshop as crude and fragile prototypes.

Nurtured by millions of dollars of investment through decades of development, these MEMS devices are now in our pockets, on our wrists, in our homes and vehicles, and even inside our bodies, sensing, actuating, and helping their host systems do more and more, while reducing power consumption and improving the accuracy of the systems they enable.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the seminal Hilton Head Workshop, in collaboration with its nonprofit organizer the Transducer Research Foundation , IEEE Spectrum presents these articles from its archives detailing the people, the breakthroughs, and the applications that powered—and are powering—the MEMS revolution. —Alissa M. Fitzgerald

Download a PDF of the collection here.

Decades of Development
New technologies often seem to appear overnight, but as historians often note, every overnight success is years in the making. Complex technologies can take 30 or 40 years to evolve from an initial prototype to an optimized and fully featured product, and MEMS is no exception. This section looks at three MEMS technologies that have been continually engineered over decades—inkjets, ultrasound imaging, and radio frequency (RF) switches—as well as two MEMS pioneers whose dedication to commercializing MEMS technologies led to many successful products over their long careers.
Advances We Saw Coming
Technologists regularly make reasonable prognostications about whether an emerging technology might one day become a product. The future, however, rarely unfolds as imagined. Instead, the road from breakthrough technology to full commercialization often takes unexpected turns. Here we dive deep into the Spectrum archives for stories about MEMS devices in their early days of development. Some stories ended the way we expected them to while others did not, and others remain in progress.
Good MEMS Vibrations
The invention of the first MEMS device, years before the creation of the acronym MEMS, is credited to Harvey Nathanson at Westinghouse Research Laboratories, in Pittsburgh, in 1965. Nathanson and his colleague Robert Wickstrom built a free-standing microscopic silicon cantilever that, when driven at its mechanical resonance, acted as a radio-frequency tuner. Since then, countless MEMS have similarly leveraged the ability of crystalline silicon and other thin-film materials to efficiently generate high-frequency vibrations. Engineers have harnessed these good vibrations to build sophisticated RF tuners, high-precision clocks, microphones, microspeakers, and even precision micro-motors, including the applications described here.
Supercharging the Internet of Things
In about 2010, with the world becoming increasingly networked through the proliferation of Wi-Fi, computers, and smartphones, researchers began to get excited about an Internet of Things. If all our computers could join a network, then why not also connect mundane things, such as building HVAC systems, factory machines, and trash cans? With MEMS sensors, these everyday objects could bring eyes and ears to the network, feeding remote computers and enabling them to make more-informed decisions. Though IoT hype has since settled down, this “sensorization” of the world quietly continues in homes, through smart products like TVs, thermostats, and refrigerators, and over large geographic areas, through distributed sensing for intelligent agriculture and environmental monitoring.
Bringing Medicine Into the Digital Age
While MEMS sensors have been used for more than 30 years to measure pulmonary and cardiac pressure, it is still early days for MEMS in other fields of medicine. But the potential is huge. Many of the thin-film materials used for MEMS are biocompatible, and the microscopic dimensions of the devices make them suitable for implantation within bodies, brains, and bloodstreams. And micro- or nanoscale structures can electrically interact with individual nerves, cells, and protein strands. Here we look at recent—and future—applications of MEMS technology in medical diagnostics and treatment, as researchers use the devices to improve quality of life and help us to unravel the mysteries of human biology.