Will MEMS standards help you earn more customers?

Contributed by Monica Takacs, Director of Marketing & Membership, MEMS Industry Group

Last week during SEMICON West, MIG staff and members, EV Group, Acuity Incorporated, and NIST attended the SEMI MEMS standards task force and committee meeting at the Marriott Marquis. This was my first time attending a SEMI standards meeting and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Standards have always been such a controversial subject at MEMS Industry Group meetings. My impression of the general consensus of our members’ view of MEMS standards is that standards may benefit the industry, but no company wants to implement standards if it means that they lose competitive advantage.

SEMI (www.semi.org/standards) has been working hard in development standards for MEMS reliability, microfluidics, micro tubes, materials characterization, wafer bonding, and terminology. They already have a list of published standards for sale. MIG encourages its members to get involved and join the conversation.

This is my forth year attending SEMICON West and each year there seems to be more emphasis on the enabling capabilities of MEMS and less explaining the definition of MEMS. As the MEMS Industry matures, standards are becoming inevitable. MIG’s charter is to advance the global MEMS market, and as an industry group we feel like the conversation about MEMS standards is very important. Standards may demonstrate the maturity of the MEMS industry by proving the reliability of MEMS to new customers in existing and new industries, thus expanding its reach to systems integrators.

What do you think about MEMS standards? Are MEMS standards important to your customers?

MIG at SEMICON WEST 2010 – Day Two

Contributed by Karen Lightman, Managing Director, MEMS Industry Group

Day two at SEMICON West started off with a BANG – thanks to the impressive breakfast hosted by Pennwell Electronics Media Group at the oh-so-swanky St. Regis. The program featured several impressive speakers: Pete Singer, editorial director
of PennWell’s Electronics Media Group
 who presented “Technology Trends in Semiconductor, Packaging & Solar Industries.” Pete’s nice overview was followed by Bill McClean, president 
of IC Insights, who gave an overall presentation on the economic outlook for the semiconductor industry. But the piece de resistance was Andrew Thompson, the co-founder and CEO of Proteus (MIG member company) who gave a fantastic keynote on 
”Emerging Applications in the Field of Medicine.” Thompson gave one of the best keynotes I’ve heard in a really long time – he eloquently and simply laid out a story on the consumerization/democratization of healthcare. Bravo – well done.

MIG at SEMICON WEST 2010 – Day One

Contributed by Karen Lightman, Managing Director, MEMS Industry Group

“Happy days are here again” is probably too rosy of a theme song for this year’s SEMICON West show, but it sure felt a lot different than last year’s. While overall attendance was higher than SEMI has seen in a while(if you include the mob scene over at the Solar show in Moscone West), I’d say that there were less exhibitors than I saw in 2008 (perhaps this is because many folks had to confirm their 2010 spots during the still-recessionary times of the summer of 2009?).

The Zen of Sensor Design

Contributed by Mike Stanley

Originally posted on Freescale’s Smart Mobile Devices Embedded Beat Blog

About two years ago, I joined the Freescale sensors team, which focuses on accelerometers, pressure sensors, and touch sensors.

Prior to that, I spent a number of years in the Freescale’s microcontroller solutions group, where I was an architect for several digital signal controller and microcontroller product families. One of the first things I learned when I moved into the sensors group was that certain “rules of the game” that relate to microcontroller design needed to be adapted when dealing with sensors. An example is package selection. With most microcontrollers, package selection is based upon number of functional and power pins required, PCB assembly processes targeted and (sometimes) thermal characteristics. Performance considerations are often secondary, if they exist at all. Sensors interact with the real world. Mechanical stresses introduced during both package assembly and PCB mounting can affect electrical performance of the device; often showing up as additional offset or variation of performance with temperature. Even the compound used for die attach has a demonstrable effect on sensor performance, and must be considered early in the design process.

Evolving Intelligence with Sensors

Contributed by Michael Stanley, Freescale Semiconductor

Originally posted on Freescale’s Smart Mobile Devices Embedded Beat blog

I’ve always been fascinated by electronic sensors. The idea of being able to measure and interact with the physical world appeals to the ten-year-old inside me. Not so long ago, if you needed to measure some physical quantity as an input to your system, you bought an analog sensor, hooked up your own signal conditioning circuitry, and fed the result into a dedicated analog-to-digital converter. Over time, engineers demanded, and got, self-contained products which handled those signal conditioning and conversion tasks for them.