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For those of you who have heard me talk about MEMS and medical/quality-of-life (QoL) applications — I don’t shy away from calling it “God’s work.” I still get misty-eyed when I think about my friend’s 10-year-old daughter, Anna, who has Type 1 Diabetes. Last year I told Anna about technology from MicroCHIPS that (thanks to the wonders of MEMS) will someday enable her to seamlessly and automatically monitor and dose…

MEMS product development is not for the faint of heart. Though you will see many success stories in the industry, you will also see many failed ventures (did anyone say “telecom bubble?”), several bankruptcies (TeraVicta to name one), gray hair (or no hair), and divorces (sad, but true). And then there are the companies that are just middling along, waiting to break through – we have a duty to help…

Perched on a bluff overlooking the Mohawk River in Niskayuna, NY is a powerhouse of industrial R&D; GE’s Global Research Center (GRC). GRC just celebrated its 110 year anniversary. Thomas Edison’s original desk is on display in the entry lobby to prove this point! (Click on any of the images below to enlarge them.) The Niskayuna facility is the largest of several GRCs. GE also has centers in Munich, Germany;…

Has the romance between the MEMS and semiconductor industries started to fizzle? Or is the real issue that for new equipment vendors, the appeal and shiny/sexy new-ness of MEMS has faded as they salivate in anticipation of a switch from 300 to 450mm (with all of that sexy, new and expensive semiconductor equipment)? In 2011, I declared that it was the "the year of MEMS" at SEMICON West in my…

MEMS in the mainstream — Music to my ears For the second year in a row, MEMS Industry Group was host to the Sensors Expo Pre-Conference Symposium, and this year’s theme was "MEMS in the Mainstream: Commercialization and Product Realization — Leveraging the MEMS Infrastructure." I felt like a bandmaster — not trying to make the music, just trying to get the band with all its different instruments, rhythms, and…

What do you think of when I say the words "MEMS new product development?" Do you envision new categories of newly discovered MEMS hatching somewhere in a university lab? If your answer is "yes," perhaps you should rethink that — because MEMS isn’t new. If we are to grow this $9 billion/year industry to a hundred-billion or even trillion dollar industry as some predict, we need to think of new…

ST’s Carmelo Papa boldly declared that "MEMS is only limited by the imagination" during his opening keynote at MEMS Executive Congress Europe.  In many ways this phrase exemplifies the conference itself. All of the speakers on our four panels  — industrial, biomedical/Quality of Life (QoL), automotive and consumer — as well as our keynotes — conveyed that frontier feeling that MEMS can truly change the world. Sure we have some challenges…