MEMS-Enabled Products: A Growing Market Segment

By Stephen D. Senturia Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emeritus, MIT, Cambridge, MA Chairman and CTO, Polychromix, Inc., Wilmington, MA

Microelectromechanical Systems, now known affectionately by the MEMS acronym, have been showing up in all kinds of places: air-bag deployment, automobile suspensions, mountain-bike altimeters, cell phones, video cameras, even computer games. The canonical MEMS component is a silicon chip with some micromechanical parts designed to respond to some physical variable – pressure, acceleration, flow, sound, radiant energy. Depending on the particular device architecture, the sensing electronics may be on the same chip as the MEMS, or the MEMS may be co-packaged with a separate CMOS chip. Product volumes for such MEMS components are measured in millions of units per year. The emphasis is on achieving a low cost at acceptable levels of performance, interchangeability and reliability. Customers buy these MEMS for incorporation into larger systems, such as automobiles or video games.

There is another type of MEMS product, the MEMS-Enabled Product, for which market volumes are measured in thousands of units per year instead of millions of units per year. This is too small a market to permit a successful business based on the manufacture and sale of the MEMS component alone. MEMS of this type can only be sold in combination with the full product into which it is incorporated.

The canonical example of a MEMS-enabled product is a measurement instrument with a unique MEMS chip embedded in its core. One can think of the MEMS-enabled product as a large inverted pyramid (the instrument) supported by a very tiny but very strong base (the MEMS). The MEMS has functionality that is unique and special. This functionality supports a novel way of doing something useful (the tip region of the inverted pyramid), which supports the next broader level: a new instrument architecture that has some important advantage over extant technology. The new instrument competes successfully, ultimately, because of the capability of the MEMS. But it doesn't compete in the MEMS market; it competes in the instrument market as an instrument, judged by its performance as an instrument. The MEMS disappears inside, but it is essential: it is enabling.