Toward Better Acoustic Resonators


After some lively conversations with the top researchers in MEMS acoustic resonators during the 2014 Sensors and Actuators Workshop (familiarly known to the MEMS community as “Hilton Head”), we set to work on a simulation solution to better serve researchers and commercial designers. Acoustic resonators for RF filtering have received a lot of attention in the past few years as the number... » read more

Building A Better Resonator


The resonant frequency of a beam depends on the mass and stiffness of the beam. Resonance has always been important in the design of musical instruments and amplification systems, as well as the design of bridges and buildings. With the advent of MEMS fabrication techniques, though, came the ability to create very small beams, in the micron or nanometer size range, with resonant frequencies ... » read more

The Future Of MEMS Sensor Design And Manufacturing


I recently gave an invited talk at the IEEE Inertial Sensors 2016 symposium that discussed the future of commodity MEMS inertial sensor design and manufacturing. Inertial sensors comprise one of the fastest growing and most successful segments of the MEMS market. There are three industry trends that I believe will have major implications for motion sensor design and manufacturing and, more g... » read more

IoT Design Challenges


Low-cost IoT designs that interface with the real world incorporate multiple design domains that individually are challenging for today’s engineers, so it’s no surprise that putting them all together creates extreme pressure on IoT design teams. The typical IoT device contains a sensor and an actuator that interface to the Internet. The sensor creates a signal based on some real-world ac... » read more

Why Use A Package?


Subramanian Iyer, distinguished chancellor's professor in UCLA's Electrical Engineering Department—and a former fellow and director of the systems scaling technology department at IBM—sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the future of chip scaling. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Advanced packaging is being viewed as a way to extend scaling in the fut... » read more

System Bits: Dec. 23


Building MEMS at one-hundredth the cost The microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) market was $12 billion business in 2014, dominated by a handful of devices, such as accelerometers that reorient the screens of most smartphones. However, researchers at MIT pointed out that potentially useful MEMS have languished in development because they don’t have markets large enough to justify the initia... » read more

China’s Demand Slowdown


It is well known that China is the largest consumer of semiconductors on a regional basis, and as China’s economic growth slows, it is interesting to take a look at where they have the most impact from a product perspective. There are a few surprises. Although the overall semiconductor average selling price in China is a fraction of the total worldwide ASP, China does not always have the lowe... » read more

Rise Of The Old Fab


Growth in the [getkc id="260" comment="Internet of Everything"], along with the beginning of a shift toward systems in package, are creating buzz in a rather unlikely place—established and well-worn process nodes where equipment is scarce, semi-functional, and difficult to maintain. In the past, moving to the next node was a sign of progress, leaving behind the trailing edge of designs to ... » read more

MEMS: Flexible, Reusable Platforms Facilitate Innovation


As the game-changing enabler for whatever the emerging market of widespread fragmented intelligence turns out to look like, the MEMS sector is in some ways the bellwether for much of the greater semiconductor/components supply chain looking to rethink how to serve a wider range of fragmented applications with lower costs and faster time to market. Leaders from Cisco, InvenSense, Nasiri Ventures... » read more

Healthy Growth Predictions For MEMS


To figure out what’s actually happening in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) market, there’s no better place to look than MEMS and sensors, which are enabling this revolution in embedded intelligence in ever more places. The MEMS market is seeing continued steady growth, but components suppliers also are seeing brutal price declines and low margins, while the data analysis side captures... » read more

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