Bryon Moyer

[From the last episode: We looked at the normal way to build a pool, and then looked generically at what’s different when you use a MEMS approach.] What follows echoes (but is not identical to) a piece I did for EE Journal way back in 2011. Because that audience is […]

[From the last episode: MEMS technology has been critical for enabling micro-scale sensors and actuators.] A first warning: this post and the next one may tax your imagination. So buckle up! We’ve seen the basic processing steps needed to make things on silicon: deposition, etching, and litho. When these are […]

[From the last episode: The big change in sensors is scale. We tend to refer to scale using “macro” for big or metric prefixes like “micro” and “nano.”] Now that we have some semiconductor basics behind us, as well as a sense of scale, let’s look at one of the […]

[From the last episode: Photolithography allows us to be selective about where we add material and where we remove it.] Before we dive into how sensors and actuators are made, here’s an important question: Sensors aren’t new, so why all the hullabaloo now? Old and Bulky Don’t Cut It OK, […]

[From the last episode: we looked at different ways of removing material from a wafer.] So far we’ve seen that we can add materials to a wafer and we can remove them. But, if those are our only tools, then it’s not particularly useful, since we’re covering a whole wafer […]