MEMS: The Second Silicon Revolution? 

Do a video on MEM(E)S.

MEMS for relays was something I came across recently.

Would like to see a video on lab on a chip and microfluidics

Micromirror and microaperture arrays are fascinating. One of the NIR spectrometers on JWST has a particularly cool one. And it’s the basis for all of Texas Instruments’ IP on DLP.

I love this if this gives me more fps

That would save lives if it stops the death spiral. (AKA the graveyard spiral). thanks for the post.

Great points. Gps fixing does not have to do with better cpu's per say, but better prediction lookup tables for faster signal fixes. If you note a first startup of a fresh gps without any tables, it takes a while to get a fix, but subsequent power ups provide faster fix times. These tables can be pre programmed, and are geographically based. However, not all systems utilize them to their full potential for quickest signal locks. Those spinning gyroscopes are bulky, but neat. Name another instrument that makes such a sound! The protective casings are a farce if the gyro decided to let go of itself fully spun up. Beautifully scary! If car bearings are packed with gyro grease, will there be a performance gain? 😝

@D R That's a great question. In fact we could just use the altitude from the GPS system. Right now you dial in the barometric "base pressure", or pressure at sea level. This is used to calibrate the altimeter so that it delivers accurate results, I believe it is within 100 feet of accuracy (other sources say the FAA allows 75 feet of accuracy). Its a big big deal. A few feet could mean if you hit a building or pass over it. Thus when you fly, you are always getting pressure updates from the controller, because you are going to need updates that are as close as possible to the pressure in your area. So why not use the GPS altitude, which is more accurate? 1. Not everyone has a GPS. 2. Even fewer have built in GPS (in the panel of the aircraft). 3. A large number of aircraft don't re calibrate their altimeters at all. 4. New vs. old. Aircraft have been around for a long time. GPS not so much. If you know a bit about aircraft, you also know that number 3 there lobbed a nuclear bomb into this conversation. Don't worry, we will get there. First, there is GPS and there is GPS, implied by 1 and 2. Most GPS units in use are portable (in light aircraft). Long ago the FAA mandated a system based on transponders called "mode-C" that couples a barometric altimeter into the transponder. OK, now we are going into the twistly road bits. That altimeter is NOT COMPENSATED FOR BASE PRESSURE. In general the pilot does not read it, the controller does (ok most modern transponders do read it out, mine does, but an uncompensated altitude is basically useless to the pilot). The controller (generally) knows where you are, and thus knows what the compensating pressure is (no, he/she does not do the math, the system does it for them). Note that GPS had nothing to do with that mode C discussion. So for the first part of this, for a GPS to be used for altitude, the pilot would have to go back to constantly reporting his/her altitude to the controller. UNLESS! You could have a mode S transponder, or a more modern UAT transceiver. Then, your onboard GPS automatically transmits the altitude, and the position, and the speed and direction of the aircraft. Now we are into equipage. Note "onboard GPS". That means built into the aircraft. Most GPS on light aircraft are handheld, which are a fraction of the cost of built in avionics. Please lets not get into why that is, its about approved combinations of equipment in aircraft, calibration, and other issues. The mere mention of it can cause fistfights in certain circles. Ok, now lets get into number 3. If you are flying over, say, 14,000 feet, its safe to say you are not in danger of hitting any mountains, or buildings, or towers. Just other aircraft. So you don't care about pressure compensation. So the rules provide that if you are over 18,000 feet, you reach down and dial the "standard pressure" of 29.92 inches of mercury, which the FAA has decreed is "standard pressure" (the FAA also has things like standard temperature, standard tree sizes, etc. fun outfit). So what does that mean? Say you are TWA flight 1, and TWA flight 2 is headed the opposite direction, same altitude. Both read 18,000 feet. Are they really at 18,000 feet? No, but it doesn't matter. If they are going to collide, they are in the same area, and thus the same pressure. Meaning that their errors cancel. It doesn't matter that they are really at 19,123 feet, they both read the same. Thus climbing to 19,000 (by the altimeter) means they will be separated by 1,000 feet. So the short answer is the final one. The barometric system is pretty much woven into the present way aircraft work. It may change, but it is going to take a long time. Like not in my lifetime.

Ohh now i get how new feature of Google maps work

you are very professional!

Working in photonics here and can confirm, FPPGAs can popularize the usage of photonic logic, and the guys from UGhent are amazing at communicating it

Photonic chips have a much larger feature size than electrical ones. So unless you only care about energy spending, I don't get how can it compete with the electrical ones even if it has 100 times higher frequency.

@@isaacdorfman a device that can commute 100 times faster than ics in optical communications have some potential. Like for example optical switch's and routers

@@eljuligallego You are right about switches(I think) but we were talking about compute. Maybe some electric/photonic hybrid can improve the current ones.

@@isaacdorfman You didn't get it, they are still field programmable gate arrays, but the gates themselves are photonic (if I myself got it right). For certain tasks benefits are huge especially so if you have some AI to recognise what better to compute with optical circuitry.

I thought the acronym stands for LIGMA?

@@econman5670 what's LIGMA??

​@@Gabagool22 LIGMA Balls B)

@@Gabagool22 Ligma ballz

@@it6647 gottem good

Another big difference is that scaling doesn't really work. Reducing the size of a MEMS sensor often makes the noise worse, but more important, there is really no benefit to fitting more sensors on a die after say 6 in the case of an IMU. Smaller dice are a bit cheaper, but if the package really dominates then this does nothing.

Maybe it will go the way of 3d printing.

​@@luminousfractal420 Interesting thought

thhx....

Depends. On PCBs, when very high accuracy is required, they laser trim them. We used laser trimmers on resistors in hybrids as well, really nothing beats it for accuracy. There was an outfit selling laser configured ICs, like an FPGA but the fuses were laser burned. The company failed, and I ran into one of their engineers later and asked him why. "contamination" -- was the answer.

Glad you like them. My mother considers them the most boring videos I put on the channel.

@@Asianometry LOL! Well I can assure you that's solely because she doesn't share our interests in it...and its not a reflection of you or the video content/quality ...because it's amazing as usual!

@@Asianometry As someone who's been heavily interested in tech/IT/Cybersecurity/this list could go on for quite awhile (lol) for most of my life now, I've found myself knowing relatively little about chip fabrication / processes. I mean obviously I know how they work, I know about the architectures and memory hierarches and transistors and all that, but was comparatively lacking on my knowledge of how they're actually produced. Not so much anymore though, because you make entertaining, incrediblely informative / educational videos on this topic (and of course many others, too!) and I truly appreciate you and what you do!!!

@@Asianometry They're the best!

@@NNOTM *She He has only one mother

You were the first one to mention it, I thought of those immediately after someone mentioned DLP, those tiny structures of MBOL's are amazing tech. Tiny temperature probes arranged in a grid that has to be thermally isolated from the substrate (and one another).

@@spikester Yup! the amazing VOx microbolometers

Years ago I used an off the shelf TI DLP chip to make a calibration device for TICs. It had the window carefully removed, then a super thin gold layer deposited on it, and recapped with a ZnSe optical window. Made testing a lot simpler since the patterns could be changed on the fly to simulate movement. Our images were BST ferroelctric sensors btw. The VOx sensors were a game changer to be sure. ❤

Yup that was the one I modified for use to calibrate thermal cameras. Decanted it and coated the mirror assembly with a very thin layer of gold then recapped it under vacuum with a ZnSe window. It saved a lot of money on that project since a bunch of test patterns could be generated as needed. ❤

MEMS *is* silicon. It's literally made from silicon using roughly the same techniques as for making microelectronics.

Yes indeed. MEMS makes them flyable. Without MEMS accelerometers and gyros, they would just flop over faster than a human can react.

And yet real helicopters are 100% human controlled so they don't flip over (most of the time).

Good video summary but light on the actual physics, specially the idea of using the coriolis effect to make mems gyroscopes. The video below goes into more details on the concept and equations for designing such a tiny gyroscope. Very ingenious! Warning! Physics equations used, not very difficult but mathemophobes have been warned. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-PK05u9c3yWI.html

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Almost all MEMS devices are i2c if they're low data rate digital and i2s if they're audio specific and digital, but analogue devices exist as well. Their packages and pinouts tend to be engineering driven rather than standardised, especially since the industry is pushing for smaller packages, you can have packages the size of the actual die pretty much, but that leaves no room for standardisation. A neat thing about i2c is that you can have a single bus of 2 data wires running throughout your whole device and all the sensors can be on there. Indeed there's an i2c bus running throughout your PC called SMBus which contains a great number of sensors and also your SDRAM SPD chips and it's also exposed onto PCIe connections. However most sensor ICs are not SMBus compliant, they cannot hotplug themselves an address, you can't auto detect them, you just hardwire them an address from the available ones via pin pullups/pulldowns and then do a register read, about a few seconds of looking in the datasheet and hardwired into your firmware according to your hardware, more complexity really isn't generally desired by the hardware designers. What use-case are you thinking of? USB HID is suitable and Bluetooth (LE) GATT is intended for sensor use.

@@SianaGearz So, is there hot switch option? Can we actually program address before or after use? It will make hotswap option available, or it will complicate things or dramatically increase pricing?

@@vputilov As long as there are no address collisions, and every address corresponds also to a particular type of device, you can treat i2c devices as polled hotplug. The addresses aren't software determined, they are determined in hardware at board layout stage, or the device can include address set jumpers. You can also get SMBus to i2c chips which handle just the dynamic address assignment (the adapter chip talks to a sensor on a fixed address, and to host it just gets a valid address from the arbiter) and device type query.

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I'm lead to believe that a number of MEMS devices are indeed MCMs - multi chip modules, such as 9-axis IMUs. But i'm not super certain. And yeah putting an existing MEMS onto an MCM leadframe makes sense i suppose. But also it may be unnecessary. Have you seen WLCSP packages? Like damn.

Aren't MEMS chips typically powered from specific purpose low-noise supplies different to the main cpu buses? They're way more electrically noise sensitive than other devices.

Given their different manufacturing challenges, seems like you'd have your SOIC and a separate MEMS chip that combines all the sensors you need.

@@gblargg Yeah, as one of the commentators mentioned above the WLCSP packaging, holy crap how tiny. PCB real-estate isn't such a big deal for MEMS devices nowadays.

@@SianaGearz you’re right, because MEMS use silicon-on-insulator instead of bulk silicon they are a separate chip than their electronics most of the time

Google says in 2020 there were around 80 million cars produced each year, which matched up to 60M perfectly. I'm guessing it's a bit lower cause he took past data

Still exists. High end stuff.

You are clearly not destined for the executive suite. 🤣

Before the cheap MEMS accelerometer, only a handful of luxury cars had airbags. Since the mid 90s, practically every car has them.

A counter argument is that enforcing a packaging standard would end up creating a natural monopoly for the company that is best able to optimise for that packaging. Basically whoever is already closest to the adopted design will most likely end up controlling that market. It is important to note that due to the bespoke nature of mechanical engineering solutions mean that there are few standard interfaces in that field. You can't effectively created standard solutions for bespoke problems. What happens when the standard solution is then not fit for purpose for an application? Do you then create a bespoke package or make the customer design around the limitations?

@@SurmaSampo I don't think the decision would be made that would effect the entire industry. I believe when there are decisions regarding standardization that the client's preference and his willingness to pay for what customization he wants will take precedence over the one assigned to produce the products. The clients' willingness to pay for their design preference will take precedence which is what has happened in the IC industry although within each foundry the process and standards are different. Thanks for the response.

@@fturla Yeah I think we are both on the same page that standardisation in MEMS wouldn't be bad in itself but there are risks to the industry in doing so and achieving a workable standard would be hard.

@@SurmaSampo We're just hoping for the best. Politics and drama usually mess up things like all other industries.

What are you even talking about. “Micron” is standard diction in the entire semiconductor and electronics industry.

@@Grak70 My sources are BIPM and NIST. Check them out for the status of "micron". Similar story when it comes to bar (use pascal), Centigrade (use Celsius), and angstrom (use nanometer or picometre).

Micron is very heavily used in materials handling industry. I've never heard the idea that it's obsolete.

@@punditgi my point is regardless of the “official” word, micron is in extremely wide use. ESPECIALLY in the semiconductor industry. There’s also IUPAC names for complex organic molecules but chemists don’t use them. In this industry, “micron” is the correct choice of word. Saying “micrometer” in this field to a colleague makes you sound like a pretentious asshole.

A micrometer is a measurement tool or adjustment mechanism. I will just stick with microns and nanometers.

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Micro memes

Memes out of sillicon? Shut up and take my upvotes

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Imagine an array of such speakers, each playing at different ranges of frequencies.