Online proceedings - EDA Publishing Association

Success in MEMS, "From DRIE Technology
to Social Innovation"
Susumu Kaminaga,
Sumitomo Precision Products Co., Ltd
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the past 10 years MEMS devices have become more
established in a number of commercial, high volume
applications such as digital projectors, ink jet printers, and
automotive motion sensors. The invention of the mobile
phone has had an enormous effect on society in terms of
interpersonal communications and working life. The demand
for “smarter” consumer products (e.g. smart phones, handheld
tablets, and gaming consoles) in the past 2-3 years has
stimulated significant growth in manufacturing MEMS devices
for mobile applications [1] .
Meanwhile, more MEMS devices are emerging with the
potential for beneficial applications in other areas such as life
sciences and energy conservation. For example, Yole
Développement forecasts, “microsystem technologies market
for healthcare applications will grow from $1.2B in 2009 to
$4.5B in 2015, representing over 1B units per year in 2015” [2] .
II. DEEP REACTIVE ION ETCH
Deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) is a key enabling process
which has been adopted by the MEMS manufacturers for
etching deep, high aspect ratio features into silicon, the most
common material used for MEMS manufacturing. Feature
sizes range from sub-micron to many hundreds of microns.
SPP Process Technology Systems (SPTS) was the first
equipment manufacturer to commercialise DRIE, also named
the “Bosch Process”, over 15 years ago, when the MEMS
industry was in its infancy.
Fig 1 – Schematic diagram illustrating the process steps of the DRIE
process
III. EMERGING MEMS APPLICATIONS
A. Wireless networking
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of spatially
distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or
environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound,
vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants, and to cooperatively
pass their data through the network to a main location. Some
networks are bi-directional, allowing the system to control the
activity of the sensors. Although the development of wireless
sensor networks was motivated by military applications such
as battlefield surveillance; today such networks are used in
many industrial and consumer application, such as industrial
process monitoring and control, machine health monitoring,
environment and habitat monitoring, home automation, and
traffic control. MEMS sensors can be designed to measure a
wide range of conditions at each node and are small, reliable
and easily integrated into an electronic system. MEMS may
also be used to scavenge energy to re-charge batteries which
maintain power at the individual nodes.
Fig 2 Multi-hopping Ad-hoc Wireless Network concept
(Courtesy of Crossbow/SPP)
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