Control Technologies for Emerging Micro and Nanoscale Systems

Abstract

The continuing evolution and maturation of techniques to integrate MEMS with CMOS is enabling creation of complex on-chip microsystems. The "More than Moore" trend in the microelectronics industry is accelerating the pace of advanced packaging, which will become increasingly exploited for MEMS integration and blur the lines between monolithic integration and heterogeneous stacked multi-chip systems. A requirement of many emerging MEMS component applications is the need for self-configuration and control in the presence of manufacturing and environmental variability. These are general attributes that hold promise of providing high manufacturing yield, resiliency and redundancy for critical applications. One class of such systems are RF circuits tightly integrated with multiple electrothermally actuated MEMS capacitors that lead to a variety of low-loss, frequency reconfigurable circuit blocks. Two exemplary self-configuring systems are micro-instrumented scanning probe arrays for tip-based nanomanufacturing and self-healing resonant mixer-filters for RF front-ends. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.