Visit:

http://dom.semi.org/downloads.nsf/standards

…and search on mems. The MS documents are standards from the MEMS Technical Committee. (Win Baylies and I co-chair this committee)

You may view the standards free for 30 days at:

http://www.semi.org/en/standards/ctr_026941

There is a growing voice for process standards and there are potentially some publicly available processes that should be adopted as standards. We have considered a working group for process standards in the past yet details on processes are non existent. The current mixture of standards participants are not directly involved with managing standard cmos mems processes.

As far as the, “If you build it, they will come” scenario…no guarantees, but having a pro-active advertising effort is sensible.

Standards have always been kind of a dirty word in this industry. I tend to agree with you as to the complexity of the MEMS technology not lending itself to “standards” as defined by the IC industry. Still, there are endless MPW CMOS processes to design for yet very few in MEMS. I wonder if the IC pioneers thought the same thing when that industry was in its infancy?

I’ve always believed (probably biased considering my source of employment the past decade) that you need to have some standard fixed processes to make it easier on students to enter the technology and convince them very early on to design for process rather than for design’s sake (and discover later on that your fabulous design is not manufacturable). Europe is using the dozen or so “standard” MPW programs as the foundation for stimulating exploitation of MEMS through the 4-year STIMESI program, which MEMSCAP, Qinetiq, Tronics, Sensonor, and IMEC have all been involved with, by providing free training courses to EU students on these varied MPW technologies. Many of these students know little to nothing about MEMS. We can see the wheels turning when we present the technology to them. By showing them that there are “standard processes” to jump right into chip design gives them an easy, natural entry point to the technology and demonstrates the value of the “think process first” long-term strategy to get consistent results at a fraction of the cost of a non-standard or custom run approach.

MEMSCAP has always touted and marketed our “standard process” portfolio despite the whiners’ disbelief and you could make an argument either way whether or not MUMPs or its “modules” are truly “standard” or not(quotation marks are getting a workout!); however it was interesting to me to see a competitor recently announce it’s new, novel “standard module manufacturing approach”. Maybe the standards are coming around?

To leverage your baseball movie lede, maybe “if we build it, they will come”?

I also agree with the turn signal comment