Presentations

MEMS/NEMS-Related Presentations, November 2003

These presentations will all be made in Nedderman Hall, room 105, at 3:30 p.m. Locate Nedderman Hall on the Campus Map

Everyone is welcome, but seating is limited. Please RSVP to Phyllis Harris at pharris@uta.edu or 817.272.1536.

Recorded presentations by guest speakers on the UTA campus are available as streaming videos. You will need a RealOne player and an Internet connection and computer capable of supporting a 256kbps sustained data rate to properly view the videos.

Title	Presenter	Date	Video
Ink Jet Deposition of Materials for MEMS and bioMEMS Packaging	Dr. David Wallace VP Technology Development MicroFAB Technologies, Inc.	November 6, 2003	Video Available
In the last decade, ink-jet has come to be viewed as a precision microdispensing tool in addition to its huge success with color printing. Today, this tool is being used in a wide range of applications, including electrical & optical interconnects, sensors, medical diagnostics, drug delivery, MEMS packaging and nanostructure materials deposition. Ink-jet microdispensing is data-driven, non-contact, and is capable of precise deposition of picoliter volumes at high rates, even onto non-planar surfaces. Being data-driven, ink-jet dispensing is highly flexible and can be readily automated into manufacturing lines. In this session, Dr. Wallace will present an overview of ink-jet technology and then focus on the applications that should be of most interest to the MEMS and Nanotechnology Communities. The speaker Dr. David B. Wallace is currently Vice President, Technology Development for MicroFab Technologies, Inc. He has 30 years of industrial experience in complex fluid flow phenomena, including 25 years in ink jet printing. He has published over 80 publications and has been awarded 28 patents. He received his BSE and MSME from Southern Methodist University and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Arlington. MicroFab Technologies, Inc. has been a pioneer in developing industrial applications of ink jet printing technology, in areas as diverse as medical diagnostics, medical devices, electronics manufacturing, optics and displays. MicroFab personnel have authored 64 patents covering these developments over the past 18 years. In addition, MicroFab has supplied ink jet equipment to over 200 organizations in Europe, Asia and North America.
RF MEMS: A Revolutionary Technology for High Frequencies	Dr. Charles L. Goldsmith CEO, MEMtronics Corporation	November 11, 2003	Video Available
The emergence of micromachining and MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) for RF applications, RF MEMS, is yet another new device technology on the horizon. A product of technology development for high-end military electronics, this revolutionary new technology is working its way through the evolutionary development cycle. Significant performance improvements over electronic control devices and passive components at frequencies over 1 GHz have been demonstrated. MEMS technology enables the construction of micro-sized mechanical devices, as well as three-dimensional RF structures, on the surface of an integrated circuit wafer. Salient features of RF MEMS switches include very high figures of merit, no quiescent power drain, and extreme linearity. The use of micromachining has also sparked new life into capacitor and inductor Q's at microwave frequencies over traditional CMOS processes. This presentation overviews the current state of MEMS and micromachined RF devices and circuits, their advantages and challenges, and a snapshot of where they are on the evolutionary scale. The speaker, Dr. Charles L. Goldsmith holds a Bachelors Degree, Masters Degree, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. Since 1982, he has been involved in the design and development of microwave and millimeter-wave circuits and subsystems. He has been employed by M/A COM, Texas Instruments, and most recently was an Engineering Fellow at Raytheon Company. Dr. Goldsmith recently formed his own company and is currently consulting and pursuing business opportunities in RF MEMS. Dr. Goldsmith has been developing RF MEMS devices and circuits since 1993, and is the inventor of the capacitive membrane RF MEMS switch. He has spent the last several years dedicated to the development and application of these devices. These activities include the innovation of switches, phase shifters, and tunable antennas for radar and satcomm applications, as well as variable capacitors and tunable filters for microwave receiver front-ends. Dr. Goldsmith has authored or co-authored over 40 publications on microwave circuits, photonics, and RF MEMS. Last year he was guest editor for a second "Special Issue on RF Applications of MEMS Technology" for the International Journal of RF and Microwave Computer-Aided Engineering (Wiley - Sept. 2001). Dr. Goldsmith is a Senior Member of the IEEE, currently serves as Chairman of the IEEE MTT-21 Subcommittee on RF MEMS, and was previously a US Delegate to the 7th World Micromachine Summit (2001) in Freiburg, Germany.
Silicon MEMS for Microassembly	Dr. George D. Skidmore Manager, Top-Down Assembly, Zyvex Corporation	November 13, 2003	Video Available
Several developments using silicon micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) for automated microassembly will be presented. These include electrothermal actuated grippers, mechanical connectors including connectors with zero-insertion force, automated macro-scale robotics, electrical relays, friction reduction coatings, and software for fabrication process emulation allowing visualization of parts and assemblies. These developments are being pursued to generate a technology for automated microassembly that is parallelizable and downscalable. Parallelism is pursued as a means to increase assembly throughput and decrease assembly costs. Downscaling into the NEMS regime will be pursued to address nanotechnology assembly applications. The speaker, Dr. George Skidmore was awarded his Ph.D. in Physics in 1998 by the University of Minnesota and his two undergraduate degrees in 1993, a B.S. in Industrial Technology and a B.A. in Physics from Western Washington University. He manages the Top-down Assembly Group at Zyvex, an interdisciplinary group of 15 scientists and engineers developing technology for assembly-based manufacturing at the micro-scale and the nano-scale. He is the principal investigator for Zyvex's NIST-ATP award, "Assemblers for Nanotechnology Application and Manufacturing: Enabling the Nanotechnology Era." His experience and skill-set include high resolution magnetic force microscopy, nanofabrication using electron beam lithography, scanning probe microscopy, semiconductor and MEMS processing, and electron microscopy, as it applies to the fabrication and characterization of micro and nanostructures. He has authored or co-authored fourteen scientific publications, has been awarded one patent and has ten patents pending as an inventor or co-inventor.
How MEMS is Revolutionizing the Film & Television Entertainment Industries	Dr. Larry J. Hornbeck, TI Fellow DLP™ Products, Texas Instruments, Plano, Texas	November 20, 2003	Video Available
At the beginning of the 21st century, cinema and television continue to rely upon fundamentally distinct exhibition technologies having their origins in 19th century inventions - motion picture film stock, the film projector, and the CRT or Braun tube. Now, cinema and television exhibition technologies are beginning to converge to the same digital solution _ Digital Light Processing(tm) projection display technology developed at Texas Instruments. DLP(tm) projection systems are becoming increasingly popular for home entertainment, and DLP Cinema(tm) technology is emerging as the digital cinema technology of choice worldwide. At the heart of these systems is the digital micromirror device or DMD chip, a MEMS-based technology monolithically integrated with CMOS circuitry on a silicon chip. The speaker, Dr. Larry J. Hornbeck of Texas Instruments is the inventor of the DMD chip. He will present an overview of DMD technology, including its architecture, manufacturing and operational characteristics. He will describe how early TI corporate strategies, combined with the inherent properties of the DMD chip and DLP(tm) projection systems, led to the technology's success over an unprecedented, broad range of display applications - from business projectors, home theater projectors, and large screen tabletop TVs, to projection systems used in pro-venue applications and digital cinema. Dr. Hornbeck will interweave technology highlights of cinema and projection television history with the often fascinating and colorful story of TI's twenty-five years of DMD and DLP(tm) technology development, as he describes how for the first time in history, television and film exhibition technologies are beginning to share a common digital medium.
Research Opportunities at the DOE Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies	Neal D. Shinn Outreach Coordinator, DOE Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies Manager, Surface and Interface Science Department Sandia National Laboratories Albuquerque, NM 87185-1415 ndshinn@sandia.gov		Presentation Available as PDF file (~42 MB)
The DOE Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies' (CINT) is a U.S. Department of Energy nanoscale science research center operated jointly by Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. The objective of CINT is to develop the scientific principles that govern the design, performance, and integration of nanoscale materials into the micro- and macro worlds. CINT has five scientific thrusts areas: The nano-bio-micro-interfaces thrust will import biological principles and functions into artificial bio-mimetic nano- and microsystems. Precise control of electronic and photonic wavefunctions to invoke novel and unique properties drives the nanophotonics and nanoelectronics thrust. The complex functional materials thrust will promote complex and collective interactions between individual components in materials to yield emergent properties and functions. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of mechanical behavior of nanoscale materials and structures is the objective of the nanomechanics thrust. Finally, theory and simulation research will contribute not only to all previous areas but also to the development of new methods and tools for multiscale modeling of integrated systems. As a DOE National User Facility, CINT encourages user participation at individual, team, and institutional levels in order to advance scientific knowledge and build our National research infrastructure. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. CINT is supported by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences.