Invited Paper MN-TuM5
Micro and Nano Electro-Mechanical Systems: Technology for Engineering Metamorphosis

Tuesday, October 16, 2007, 9:20 am, Room 615

The core of MEMS technology is the capability to form chip-integrated micro beams, cantilevers, and plates. DARPA has mined MEMS technology since the early 1990s in an effort to provide increased performance and functionality to integrated circuits. MEMS allows one to use reduced mass for increased resonance frequencies in micro-resonators; craft long and thin high aspect ratio structures for high thermal resistances; and generate huge surface-to-volume ratios for increased interaction with the environment. MEMS technology changes systems so rapidly that there is less of an evolution, and more of a metamorphosis; gradual growth is replaced by complete transformation. This is especially true in the last decade of MEMS, where integration over multiple MEMS devices is finally making the Systems part of MEMS closer to reality. This talk will describe scaling issues in realizing MEMS systems with a particular emphasis on micropackaging, new materials, and design principles on reliability of MEMS and NEMS subcomponents. The successful realization of the chip-scale atomic clock, which is a multiphysics microsystem, will be described in the context of MEMS thermal isolation.