MEMS The Next Step

Michael Orshan
Team Technologies

Progress in technology is always moving forward. This progress moving to commercial products is another story. MEMS and miniature technologies are an exciting space with huge promise. However, someone somewhere needs to do some dull thinking to get this into real products.

One area is the lack of development and production standards. How can we get truly versatile products if an assembly needs to be totally changes for each device? Who is the standards group that is working on this and when will they finish? Large companies will only invest in MEMS when the cost to product is worth it. Standards need to implement all the way from R&D to production. I spent many years building telecommunication products. We knew that issue such as heat, management, timing and alarms needed to meet the specifications outlined by both national and international associations. It was not a perfect world. Europe, North America and Asia all have slightly different ways of sending data. However, each follows some basic standards. This has lowered the R&D costs and allow for reasonable production costs with little change.

Another related area is the production cycle. In telecommunications we expected a product could get to the public in about two to three years. The entire final year was dedicated to industry certifications. Some of this does not happen today, due to costs, but the industry has matured and de facto standards are built into most devices. How long does a MEMS product take to build from day one? In needs to get down to a reasonable level.

Even with these issues, the capacity available to produce the MEMS products being created is in great question. Investors need to see the value in promoting standards and lower the production cycles. Then capacity building will be less of a risk. Today, another building new capacity needs to be involved in solving the industry problems. Sometimes working together is difficult, but it must be done. This needs to be done with the help of scientists, entrepreneurs, marketing, operations and the media.

Assuming everything begins to align this next issue should begin to dissipate. However, until that is done, the quality of MEMS devices needs to be addressed? Quality control is difficult when there is such a lack of assembly lines and standards. What do measure quality to? Again, without the quality measurements issue solved, will large companies invest?

MEMS and miniature technologies are the future of all devices. Most will agree to that. When this happens is a larger issue. My guess is as more and more mission critical applications use MEMS technology we will see the need for standards, quality and more funding will show up. More on mission critical applications next week.