Will microengineering affect your business

Microengineering technology is leaving the research laboratories and has come of age. The article gives a flavour of its benefits, opportunities, and applications. It also discusses how industry can bring onboard and incorporate this important strategic technology into its products. Microengineering enables: the production of smaller, lighter, and faster versions of existing mechanical devices, with increased dimensional accuracy, e.g micromotors; the production of sensors, mainly exploiting the electromechanical properties of silicon, where electrical characteristics change in response to a change in a particular external parameter, e.g. temperature, pressure, acceleration, humidity and radiation; the use of materials and processes common to integrated microelectronics with micromechanical components, thus bringing about improvements in performance and cost; batch processing to fabricate large volumes of miniature components at low cost, e.g ink jet nozzles; the opportunity to extend process technology to include materials and techniques not used in microelectronics, but which offer specific advantages to micromechanical devices, e.g. LIGA; the economic integrated manufacture of complete systems to include sensing, computation and actuation.<>