Grand Challenge in N/MEMS

Micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) have seen a very steep progression in R&D in the 1980s and 1990s, both in academia and industry. The rapid growth has been enabled by new fabrication methods derived from semiconductor integrated circuit manufacturing. These are basically lithography, thin film deposition dry and wet etching, which were tailored for MEMS purposes, since MEMS often uses silicon not only as semiconducting but also primarily as mechanical material (Petersen, 1982). Today, some MEMS-based products are a mature industry that delivers commodity products for our everyday life, such as integrated multi sensor modules (9 degrees-of-freedom inertial, gas, pressure, temperature, and flow), actuators (inkjet nozzles, digital mirror displays), communication components (RF filters, oscillators, duplexers), and other transducers (power harvesters). The forecasts for the MEMS market show a compound annual growth rate of 5–24% for the period 2013–2019 (Yole Développement, 2015). The increasing impact that MEMS are having on markets is caused by their typically small size, which makes them minimally invasive into larger systems (cars, domotic, health care), and cost-efficient to produce, therefore facilitating their implementation in portable, ubiquitous electronics. Figure 1 shows some representative examples of advanced MEMS. However, according to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS; 2013b) current MEMS technologies will not be able to meet next decade’s society requirements in terms of performance, functionalities, power consumption, cost, and size. Why is that? It is generally accepted that for a continuous growth, MEMS faces the following challenges.