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[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 […]

[From the last episode: There are many kinds of materials that you might want to add to a wafer, and there are many different ways of doing that.] Last time, we looked at adding materials to a wafer, and we used the generic meaning of deposition to cover all the […]