Category: MEMS

from the he-knows-if-you've-been-bad-or-good dept.
EddieWehri brings our attention to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Yep, yet one more SF concept from books like The Diamond Age make it into prime time. MEMS science is producing dust sized surveillence devices that are lighter than air and float around collecting data and reporting back to the mother base." Excerpt: "Each mote contains a solar cell to generate power, sensors that can be programmed to look for specific information, a tiny computer that can store the information and sort out which data is worth reporting, and a communicator that enables the mote to be 'interrogated' by the base unit…'This is a technology of total surveillance' "

from the top-down-bottom-up-whatever-works dept.
Senior Associate Brian Wang brings to our attention a press release from the University of Illinois at Chicago on work presented at the BioMEMs & Biomedical Nanotechnology World 2000 conference: "Another example of therapeutic BioMEMs that Desai will discuss are cell encapsulation devices with nanometer-sized pores that can protect implanted cells or components from large molecules like antibodies while allowing small molecules like hormones and nutrients to freely pass through. Such devices, which have long been dreamed of for implanting pancreatic islet cells in diabetic patients or neurosecretory cells in Parkinson's or Alzheimer's patients, are now being fabricated in Desai's laboratory by micro-machining silicon to create precisely controlled micro- and nano-architectures."

from the really-tiny-scrubbing-bubbles dept.
GinaMiller (and others) wrote "Simulation shows that liquid jets a few nanometers in diameter might have the potential to produce ever-smaller electronic circuitry, inject genes into cells, or etch tiny features. Writing in the August 18 issue of Science, Georgia Tech researchers suggest that jets as small as six nanometers in diameter may be possible — though they will require special conditions to operate and be sensitive to effects not of concern to macroscopic jets. As a next step, the researchers would like to create nanojets experimentally and use them to apply patterns that could replace current lithographic processes in the manufacture of nanoscale miniaturized circuits. They could potentially also be used as "gene guns" to insert genetic materials into cells without causing damage. The researchers produced some nice graphics "

from the where-oh-where-is-good-software dept.
Senior Associate Michael Butler writes "At the just-past Foresight Gathering, mention was made of extant MEMS fab CAD software packages and how bad they are. Alternatives mentioned include, e.g., recycling mature finite element FORTRAN code and stitching it together with other things. It happens that Matra open sourced a bunch of CAD/CAM code last year. (Slashdot article). I suggest that interested people at Zyvex and elsewhere check out Open Cascade and see if what they're doing can be bent to your purposes. Have any nanodotters worked with this code?