Disruptive Miniaturization

Many, many formerly large gadgets can be miniaturized, with cost & power savings and performance improvements by using the ultra-high precision fabrication techniques employed by the semiconductor industry to make computer chips and memories. 

Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) is a moniker that initially stood for any tiny machine that coupled mechanical motion to electric circuits to enable new devices.  MEMS has since been stretched to include not just mechanical machines, but many non-mechanical devices like flow cells for biology, special optical gratings or lenses, some quantum computers, and is sometimes associated with the kinds of semiconductor processing techniques used rather than the device actually be fabricated.  It isn’t even confined to the “micrometer” scale anymore with dimensions well into the nanometer scale for many devices.

These techniques are already used to make the microphones, speakers, cameras, lenses, pressure sensors, lasers, accelerometers, gyroscopes, and RF switches in your cell phone that are small, lightweight, and low power so they fit in your handheld device and won’t drain the battery too quickly.  These devices are also in your automobile, to sense when to deploy air bags, sense exhaust gases to improve combustion, ensure your tires are properly inflated, and to make sure you don’t crash during a lane change or parking maneuver. 

Photonic integrated circuits take a whole optical table full of expensive precision manufactured and hard to align components and reduces it to an optical microchip with no need for alignment.  A flow cell takes large scale biological processes down to the chip level for DNA sensing, pathogen detection, or monitoring of chemicals in a blood sample, often with better selectivity and specificity than in the past. 

Let’s take a step back to appreciate the other possibilities to unlock business value in other industries. Miniaturization really has just started and can drive disruptive technologies at a pace, cost point, and scale that are often hard to grasp until done.  Many people have never heard of these startup companies or research groups with truly disruptive technologies: 

·      Butterfly Network created a miniaturized hand-held ultrasound sensor that plugs into a doctor’s cell phone to provide instant internal imaging during a wellness exam.

·      Block Engineering are makers of compact, narrow line width, and tunable frequency lasers that are highly valued for spectroscopy measurements in living tissues.

·      How about a chip scale Electron Accelerator for high energy electron beams.

·      iChrom solutions has demonstrated that a mass spectrometer can be turned into a chip!

·      This group from Yale University published the creation of a Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) on a chip that generates two quantum entangled photons that can be used for quantum communication for secure communication over fiber optics for improved security.

These examples really stimulate thought about what ELSE might be possible?  The challenge is that new technologies require customized processing, which poses a challenge I will address in another post.  This is where expertise is needed to help find the willing partners and develop a collaborative development effort that attempts to anticipate and discover the technology risks so that these devices are ultimately successfully manufactured at scale.

What project are you envisioning building at the nano-scale?