ECE Seminar Time: 9:30-10:30am, Friday, February 1, 2008 Place: NEB 102 Silicon MEMS Comes of Age Prof. Roger T. Howe (NAE Member, IEEE Fellow) Department of Electrical Engineering Center for Integrated Systems Stanford University Silicon micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) is currently a healthy $7 billion/year (worldwide) industry and is well-established as an offshoot of semiconductors. Since it has been 21 years this coming November since the first MEMS Workshop in Hyannis on Cape Cod, MEMS can indeed be considered to reached ˇ°adulthoodˇ± as a field. Silicon MEMS are dominant in a variety of sensing and actuating applications; in addition, they have promise for implementing some electronic signal-processing functions. This talk will first discuss a cluster of recent developments that together are lowering the barrier to high-volume MEMS applications in consumer electronics. Low-temperature microstructural and sacrificial materials are being used for the modular co-fabrication of MEMS after CMOS, as well as for MEMS on glass substrates. Thin-film microshells have been demonstrated that provide long-term hermetic encapsulation, which completely eliminate the need for special MEMS packages for inertial sensors and resonators. Also significant has been the successful high-volume production of MEMS microphones ¨C the first ˇ°openˇ± polysilicon sensor with sense element surfaces being exposed to the ambient. A variety of nanomechanical structures have been investigated over the past fifteen years. Recent work at Stanford and elsewhere indicate that nano electromechanical electrostatic switches or ˇ°moving-gateˇ± transistors have great promise for future logic and memory devices. After reviewing some of the motivations for these structures, I will discuss some recent modeling and experimental results that highlight the challenges and opportunities for this burgeoning area for research. The continued growth of MEMS will require the education of increasing numbers of MEMS engineers, as well as the retreading of those without a background in the field. My talk will conclude with a description of changes in graduate-level MEMS education at Stanford that are intended to address these challenges. Prof. Roger T. Howe received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC-Berkeley in 1981 and 1984, respectively. From 1984 to 1985, he was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. From 1985 to 1987, he was an assistant professor at the Department of EECS at MIT. He joined the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC-Berkeley in 1987 and was a professor there until 2005. During his tenure at UC-Berkeley, he was a Director of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, and Department Chair. He is currently a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stanford University. ECE Seminar Time: 9:30-10:30am, Friday, February 1, 2008 Place: NEB 102 Dr. Howe is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2005) and an IEEE Fellow (1996). He is an Editor of the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems and Sensors and Actuators A. He served as Co-General Chairman of the 1990 IEEE Micro Electro Mechanical Systems Workshop (MEMS 90) and as General Chairman of the 1996 Solid-State Sensor and Actuator Workshop in Hilton Head, S.C. He is the co-author of Microelectronics: An Integrated Approach, Prentice Hall, 1997, an undergraduate text. He is co-recipient of the 1998 IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award. His other awards include Devices Career Development Professorship (1988-1991); NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986); IBM Faculty Development Award (19841986); and Sakrison Memorial Prize and Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award. He is a member of the technical advisory boards of several companies, including ACLARA BioSciences and DaimlerChrysler.