-Micro Electro Mechanical Systems will soon usher in a new technological renaissance. Just as ICs brought the pocket calculator, PC, and video games, MEMS will provide a new set of products and markets. Learn about the state of the art, from inertial sensors to microfluidic devices[1]. Over the last few years, considerable effort has gone into the study of the failure mechanisms and reliability...

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 si...

Fingerprint image quality is an important factor in the performance of Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems(AFIS). It is used to evaluate the system performance, assess enrollment acceptability, and evaluate fingerprint sensors. This paper presents a novel methodology for fingerprint image quality measurement. We propose limited ring-wedge spectral measure to estimate the global fingerp...

s With the advancements of MEMS foundry services and CAD tools, MEMS devices can be costeffectively designed and prototyped. Here, four designs that utilize these tools are presented: 1) a flexure design used to reduce the device warpage resulting from the mismatch in thermal expansion coefficients between the device and the substrate for flip-chip bonded MEMS, 2) a digitally positioned micro-m...

The MEMS (Micro-Electronical Mechanical System) scanning mirror is an optical MEMS device that can scan laser beams across one or two dimensions. MEMS scanning mirrors can be applied in a variety of applications, such as laser display, bio-medical imaging and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). These commercial applications have recently created a great demand for low-driving-voltage and low-p...

A critical step in automatic fingerprint matching is to automatically and reliably extract minutiae from the input fingerprint images. However, the performance of a minutiae extraction algorithm relies heavily on the quality of the input fingerprint images. In order to ensure that the performance of an automatic fingerprint identification/verification system will be robust with respect to the q...

Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) uses fingerprint segmentation as its pre-processing step. A fingerprint segmentation step divides the fingerprint image into foreground and background. An AFIS that uses a feature extraction algorithm for person identification will tend to fail if it extracts spurious features from the noisy background area. So fingerprint image segmentation pl...

In this study, the authors present a hierarchical algorithm to register a partial fingerprint against a full fingerprint using only the orientation fields. In the first level, they shortlist possible locations for registering the partial fingerprint in the full fingerprint using a normalised correlation measure, taking various rotations into account. As a second level, on those candidate locati...

RF MEMS capacitive switches capable of orderof-magnitude impedance changes have demonstrated operating lifetimes exceeding 100 billion switching cycles without failure. In situ monitoring of switch characteristics demonstrates no significant degradation in performance and quantifies the charging properties of the switch silicon dioxide film. This demonstration leads credence to the mechanical r...

Microelectromechanical System (MEMS) and microfabrication have experienced phenomenal growth over the past few years, and have had tremendous impact on and have also led to major breakthroughs in information technology, computers, medicine, health, manufacturing, transportation, energy, avionics, security, etc. Development of MEMS is multiphysics in nature and is based upon fundamental theory, ...