Mems

29 Nov 23

A Watch That Runs For Over A Decade On A Single Battery

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Glenn Zorpette: Hello and welcome to Fixing the Future, an IEEE Spectrum podcast where we look at concrete solutions to some big problems. I’m your host, Glenn Zorpette, Editorial Director at Spectrum. And before we start, I just want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage from…

17 Nov 23

New Watch Motor Seeks to Outsmart the Smartwatch

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Could the analog quartz wristwatch, a mainstay of the timepiece market for more than half a century, be headed finally for a high-tech makeover? A French startup, SilMach, in Besançon, France, is betting big that it is. The company has used silicon microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to produce an entirely new…

14 Nov 23

Speaker Chip Uses Ultrasound to Crack Volume Limits

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Despite having heard the song probably 50 times in the last two years, I discovered there are notes in David Bowie’s “Starman” that I’d never heard until one morning in early November. That’s when I got to try a prototype noise-canceling earbud from xMEMS. The five-year-old startup specializes in making…

28 Apr 23

Shapeshifting Nano-Devices Slide Into Place

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

The world’s smallest conventional electronics—devices only nanometers in scale—are typically like any other solid object large or small. When they’re manufactured, they’re molded into a shape, and the item retains that same shape over the course of its functional lifetime. Yet what if nanoscale electronic components and devices could shapeshift?…

26 Apr 23

MEMS Microspeakers Blast Sounds From the Fab

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

The future of audio is silicon.That, at least, is the pitch from audio company xMEMS, which recently announced the availability of the world’s “only all silicon, solid-state fidelity micro speakers.” Designed by xMEMS and produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the speakers pair the consistency and efficiency of modern…

16 Jan 23

Designing a Silicon Photonic MEMS Phase Shifter With Simulation

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

This sponsored article is brought to you by COMSOL.The modern internet-connected world is often described as wired, but most core network data traffic is actually carried by optical fiber — not electric wires. Despite this, existing infrastructure still relies on many electrical signal processing components embedded inside fiber optic networks.…