MEMS bite

I was looking at Analog devices for MEMS accelerometers for work. I find these micromachined sensors amazing. Think of all the different scenarios they can used in. The world is soon going to be swarmed by a plethora of swarming mites while we go on taking our world for granted.

So where are M.E.M.S. used at the moment? The most common applications of M.E.M.S. are those that require sensors or tiny pumps. Current common examples of M.E.M.S. include the ink-spraying nozzles on inkjet printers and accelerometer sensors as used in car airbags, where the micromachines are used to initiate them at the correct time. The latter may seem suprising, bearing in mind that the sensors are required to function in an impact scenario where many of the large, strong, mechanical items may well be destroyed, but this is another key aspect of the M.E.M.S. advantages over conventional engineering methods. At the nano-engineering level conventional ideas regarding robustness are replaced with concepts, which, at first reading, may seem somewhat counter-intuitive. The small size of M.E.M.S. mean that they have very little inertia of their own and so are not subject to large forces on impact, and the purity with which they have to be manufactured means that the faults in materials which would cause other, larger, systems to break are non-existant. The cost saving is also huge. For example atypical airbag sensor produced using traditional methods would cost about $500, whereas current M.E.M. accelerometers are in production by their millions at a cost of just $5 each, one hundredth of the cost.