Five years from now many more companies will be making money from nanotechnology-based products than is currently the case, but the nanotech business will still be fundamentally a materials-oriented business. I believe the real question is: How will these inevitable advancements in nanomaterials change the MEMS sensor market?
Some sensors will be fundamentally unchanged. For example, the largest MEMS sensor market today is pressure sensing in the automobile market (for tire pressure, engine pressure, etc.). These products are mainly mechanical in nature and transmit an electrical signal, and it is unlikely that nanotech advancements are going to change the fundamental design or application of these types of products.
The same could be said for another common MEMS sensor in use today: accelerometers. These are used in everyday devices such as iPods and mobile phones with applications ranging from shutting down the spinning hard drive, in case the device is dropped, to changing the video screen image from portrait to landscape automatically, depending on the position of the mobile phone's camera. Again, as these are primarily mechanical devices it is unlikely the nanotechnology is going to radically alter them five years from now.
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Nanotechnology is much more likely to have a significant impact on the sensors that require advanced materials to detect the presence of chemicals, toxins, gases, impurities, and the like. It is likely that some of these sensors are not yet in the market because the needed sensitivity or cost-effectiveness is not available today, however advancements in nanotechnology in the next five years will enable such sensors to be developed and be less expensive.
A simple example is in the airline security industry. Major advancements have been made in the past two years alone in the detection capability for explosive materials such as TATP. New machines are being developed, tested, and deployed at airports throughout the world on a monthly basis. The latest generations of these machines use "puffer" technology to quickly suck in the air surrounding a passenger and then sense the air for any unwanted pollutants. These systems are very expensive to purchase, calibrate and maintain, and their sensitivity and overall effectiveness are under constant scrutiny. In this case, it is highly likely that five years from now nanotechnology advancements will be in the heart of such systems to make them more sensitive, reliable and cost-effective.
Industrial applications for sensors are a major area for advancement by new nanotech advancements in the next five years. Many manufacturing and material processing applications require extremely pure chemicals, gases, water, etc. In fact, the raw materials can never be pure enough in many instances.
The incremental cost of improving the purity of the raw materials—and testing and verifying the purity—is extremely expensive. This is major issue faced by semiconductor manufacturers, for example. New levels of purity in the raw materials and manufacturing environment are required for next-generation devices.
Thus, every time that Moore's law is enacted (roughly every 18 to 24 months) and a new microprocessor doubles the capacity of its predecessor, the entire industry has had to double its effectiveness in supplying purer gases, chemicals, water and manufacturing environments. However, the price to supply to these higher purity products and services does not rise very much as the pressure from the market is too great to keep costs low.
As existing purification and testing technologies reach the end of their life cycle and cannot be improved cost-effectively, new sensing capabilities provided by nanotech materials advancements will enter the market and allow for advancements in raw materials purification.
I believe that in five years nanotech advancements will have little impact on what are considered today's most commonplace MEMS sensing devices: pressure sensors and accelerometers. This is because these devices are largely mechanical. However, significant advancement will be available five years from now in terms of sensing capabilities for chemicals, gases, toxins, and impurities in raw materials. These advancements will come almost entirely through developments in nanotechnology that enable new, cost-effective materials to be implemented.
Insight interAsia Pte Ltd. is a pan-Asia consultancy headquartered in Singapore. The company specializes in helping technology-based SMEs enter the various Asian markets and grow their presence throughout the region. The company has developed a core competence in assisting semiconductor and MEMS/nano companies with sales, distribution, partnering and manufacturing throughout Asia.
I would suggest we will see a continuing developmental progression as distinct from a step jump from MEMS to nano—a period of hybridization for some time to come. We are already seeing sensors that incorporate both MEMS and nano elements, and I believe we will see a proliferation of devices based on this approach.
Nano and micro are simply components of a dimension continuum. We will see a greater focus on sensor function at the nano level (e.g. molecular chemical interaction, or physical nano particle geometry with porous nano particles dramatically increasing surface area resulting in greater sensitivity, or the stressed proximity of nanoparticles in strain gages.
Ultimately, a nano-based sensor needs to interface to the macro world, so functional elements in the nano domain may well be carried on micro transport mechanisms (MEMS) integrated into more complex systems.
Biosensors will lead a serious thrust in this area where almost by definition the functional domain is at the nano level. In biotechnology and medical diagnostics we are only at the very beginning of applications.
We are also only beginning to explore biomimetics—the mimicking of sensory elements in nature using nanotechnology approaches—but will we see this area seriously exploited within a five-year time frame? Probably not.
Whilst the promise of nano-based sensors is outstanding, I believe, that within a five-year time frame, we will only see a fraction of what is to come.
The next bubble is intelligent sensing, decision making and acting on that decision. Different companies are doing variations on this same theme where they are integrating more and more intelligence and functionality on to the same chip as the transducer.
The transducer themselves are getting more sophisticated as is the MEMS development. Beyond that will be the integration of nanotechnology at that level and that will provide a whole new set of capabilities to solve problems. The development of nanotechnology and its applications is a wide open fast moving field right now.
Application integrated circuit has not been big yet but it will be over the next 10 years. It just lends itself to properties and capabilities that we cannot even imagine right now.
I think the people who are doing real nanotechnology research and development don’t really have a connection regarding what to do with this capability, what you do with the ability to make such functionality or capability of a material property, and/or how you take those material properties and translate them into a commercial advantage in an IC sensor or other device.
For instance, an ultra black has been created. A material has been developed using carbon nanotechnology; it’s the blackest of the black that has ever been created.
So what good is that? This could be really great for optical sensors or for solar cell technology, because it would absorb the maximum amount of solar energy or the maximum amount of light input energy. Blackest black means that no light is being reflected and all light is being absorbed.
What could you do with that on a sensor? Well, perhaps one can make a better temperature sensor, opto sensor. I don’t think we yet know the impact nanotechnology will have on the integrated circuit sensors, but I am sure it will be significant.
While MEMS and nanotechnology are being developed from slightly different perspectives (silicon chips vs. materials), from a sensing standpoint, their paths are just now starting to cross.
In some respects they are highly complementary to one other; in other respects, they could be formidable competitors. Micro-machined components (such as lab-on-a-chip or arrays of tiny cantilevers) coupled with nano-thin films of materials, are ideally suited for next-generation biological and chemical sensing.
While the market for lab-on-a-chip has struggled to gain market traction over the past 15 years, the recent addition of nanomaterials may very well be the technological boost these devices have been looking for. However, this remains a very tricky area of development, as the complexity of the underlying MEMS platform is proving difficult to manufacture.
On the other end of the spectrum is direct head-to-head competition. In five years’ time, MEMS pressure sensors and accelerometers will remain the sensing platform of choice for many applications, but that could start to change within a decade.
Several universities have recently demonstrated that nanowires of various materials have very sensitive pressure sensing capabilities; and conductive fibers (using nanoscale materials) for vibration sensing are now in the early stages of development. The implications for MEMS sensors from a market standpoint could be costly— particularly as it pertains to two emerging applications: implantable medical sensing and electronic textiles.
While much work remains to be done in terms of nanoscale sensing for these two areas, it bears close watching. The bottom line is that manufacturers of MEMS sensors cannot afford to ignore the promise (or peril) that nanotechnology may have to their business.
Marlene Bourne is president and principal analyst of Bourne Research LLC and is a member of MANCEF. She can be reached at: www.bourneresearch.com.
 Bill Murphy
Analog Devices Inc. Micromachined Products Division
Product Line Director of Consumer Products
www.analog.com |
If you've ever played a video game, or watched someone else play one, you've observed the amount of “body english” humans use while attempting to communicate with their “electronic device”. People tilt left and right, lean back and forwards, stiffen up, or slink down in response to the action on the screen. The movements are a human’s instinctual attempt to control the action. The fact that we have to translate our desire for movement into keystrokes, mouse clicks or joystick movements adds a layer of mental overhead in our attempt to communicate within the gaming experience.
This overhead makes responses less intuitive, harder to use and makes the interface less natural. The idea behind using motion sensing technology is to reduce this overhead and make the human-device communication process more natural.
The ability to process real-world analog signals has become a major growth driver for the semiconductor industry among which MEMS motion sensors are a part. First, there was analog audio and video signal processing. Now, there’s MEMS motion signal processing. New remote game controllers and the Apple iPhone are significant steps in the direction of harnessing human motion to control a host of devices from video games to portable handhelds. Both have been a hit with consumers and have flown of the shelves. For handsets, the iPhone is just the beginning. MEMS motion sensing is an enabler that will soon make all kinds of functions possible.
Looking beyond discrete motion sensors, there is even more potential applications for highly integrated and intelligent sensor signal processing by integrating multiple motion sensors like gyros and low-g accelerometers or multiple sensor types into a single device.
In most cases, the necessary core components already exist. The challenge is in system-level design, analysis, test, embedded SW, power-management and the many other elements required for an optimized solution.
The intricacies of the sensor elements (such as inertial, temperature, pressure, magnetic, biometrics, etc) require intimate systems and implementation knowledge to extract the desired performance. Because there are often technologic (or economic) barriers to further integration of the sensors with the other analog and digital processing, the conditioning, tuning, and other signal-chain optimizations that are required are left largely unaddressed by many component manufacturers today. System-in-Package integration is one means to address this dilemma, however, power, size, and cost issues will continue to dictate advancement and adoption beyond motion sensing’s current horizon.
 Michael Gaitan Ph.D.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),
Semiconductor Electronics Division
Leader, Enabling Devices Group
inquiries@nist.gov
www.eeel.nist.gov
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Five years from now, current micro technologies will still be the solution of choice for some applications. I also believe that new nanotechnologies will be the solution of choice for others. More importantly, I envision that the majority of solutions of choice will be a combination of both.
The lesson that we learned in MEMS technology is that the user/customer will choose the technology that solves the problem of interest as inexpensively and as reliably as possible without any consideration as to what the technology is called. In the final analysis, the consumer makes the choice.
I believe that micro and nano technologies are complementary and that nanotechnologies are a natural progression of miniaturization. My perspective is that Micro Technologies are a bridge between the macro world and the nano world.
The Atomic Force Microscope is a perfect example. This is a nanoscale tool/process that is enabled by a microscale device, namely a micromachined cantilever beam.
In the end, the consumer will decide, and their decision may not reflect the highest performance or most elegant solution.