An Introduction to mems (Micro-electromechanical Systems)

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In 1999, the MEMS industry witnessed unprecedented growth and wealth creation as major 

venture capital and corporate funding took place.  Today, it is no longer necessary to build a 

separate fabrication facility to create a MEMS product or invest hundred of millions of dollars 

to become a MEMS player.  A newly created infrastructure of smaller foundries is now 

available to support both emerging and proven MEMS-based applications.  Although the 

biggest of these foundries are the risk-taking producers of specialized and niche chips such as 

Motorola, Sony, Analog Devices and Texas Instruments, there are also many smaller start-up 

MEMS foundries which offer more specialized services such as packaging, testing, reliability 

analysis etc.  Not only do these foundries offer the obvious manufacturing technology and 

services to outside customers but they offer the concept of ‘shared learning’ in that lessons 

learned when the foundry puts into volume production one product can be applied to the 

subsequent volume production of another product.  This can occur even when the products are 

completely different because there will still be sharing of specific process modules.  Today, 

there are more than 40-50 MEMS makers or foundries worldwide (though none has broken 

away from the pack as in the case, for example, of Intel with computer chips).