Friction and wear are major limiting factors for the development and commercial implementation of devices fabricated by surface micromachining techniques. These tribological properties are studied using a polycrystalline silicon nanotractor device, which provides abundant, quantitative information about friction and wear at an actual microelectromechanical system (MEMS) interface. This in situ ...

Over the last five years, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) solutions have steadily eroded the 100-year-old monopoly held by quartz crystal solutions for frequency control and timing products. MEMS technologies, originally designed around the promise of smaller form factors, have enabled significant additional advantages related to lead time, supply stability, product reliability, device si...

We propose an electrostatically-actuated microelectromechanical digital-to-analog converter (M-DAC) device with low actuation voltage. The spring structures of the silicon-based M-DAC device were monolithically fabricated using parylene-C. Because the Young's modulus of parylene-C is considerably lower than that of silicon, the electrostatic microactuators in the proposed device require much lo...

Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS), by their nature as sensors and actuators, require application specific packaging. The package is the near environment of the MEMS device and hence has a direct effect on its thermal behavior, on mechanical effects, and on environmental compatibility and contamination. Therefore, understanding the influence of the packaging on MEMS device performance is cri...

We have designed a tunable, oblique-incidence resonant grating filter that covers the C band as an add-drop device for incident TE-polarized light. We tune the filter by tilting a microelectromechanical systems platform onto which the filter is attached. The fabrication tolerances as well as the role of finite incident-beam size and limited device size were addressed. The maximum achievable eff...

We present the design and proof-of-concept demonstration of an optical device capable of producing true-time delay(s) (TTD)(s) for phased array antennas. This TTD device uses a free-space approach consisting of a single microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) mirror array in a multiple reflection spherical mirror configuration based on the White cell. Divergence is avoided by periodic refocusing ...

This paper reports on the design, fabrication and preliminary test results of a novel microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) device—the acoustic gyroscope. The unique operating mechanism is based on the “acoustic version” of the Sagnac effect in fiber-optic gyros. The device measures the phase difference between two sound waves traveling in opposite directions, and correlates the signal to the a...

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the invention of the fi rst beam-lead device by Lepselter et al. Lepselter and coworkers proposed a method of fabricating a new semiconductor device structure and its application to highfrequency silicon switching transistors and ultra-high-speed integrated circuits. Beam-lead technology, also known as air-bridge technology, has established itself for its...