Why Didn’t MEMS Take Off in 1965?
• Resonant gate transistor was a poor on-chip frequency
reference à metals have a high temperature sensitivity
and don’t have a sharp resonance (low-Q) … specific
application didn’t “fly”
• In 1968, Robert Newcomb (Stanford, now Maryland)
proposed and attempted to fabricate a surface
micromachined electromagnetic motor after seeing the
Westinghouse work
– Energy density scaling for this type of motor indicated
performance degradation as dimensions were reduced …
– Materials incompatibility with Stanford’s Microelectronics Lab
research focus on electronic devices became a major issue