MEMS are Becoming 3D and Atomically Precise

Andrei M. Shkel, University of California, Irvine

Andrei M. Shkel has been on the faculty at the University of California, Irvine since 2000. From 2009 to 2013, he was on leave from academia serving as a Program Manager in the Microsystems Technology Office of DARPA. Dr. Shkel has been on a number of editorial boards, most recently as Editor of IEEE/ASME JMEMS and the founding chair of the IEEE Inertial Sensors. Dr. Shkel is the IEEE Fellow. He has been awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service (in 2013), the 2009 IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement Award, and the 2005 NSF CAREER award. He received his Diploma (1991) in Mechanics and Mathematics from Moscow State University, Ph.D. degree (1997) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and postdoc (1999) at Berkeley Sensors and Actuators Center (BSAC).

Microtechnology comes of age. Clearly, some significant advances have been made, and we see a footprint of the technology in an ever-growing consumer electronics market full of interactive products enabled by microtechnology. These products include, for example, accelerometers for gaming applications, gyros for auto safety, resonators for clocks, and more. The questions remain, however: Is the technology really on the level of what we consider to be precision sensing? Is making sensors small necessarily result in degradation of performance? These questions led us to development of glassblowing technology for precision sensing and origami-like assembly techniques for classical and atomic MEMS; all to be discussed in this talk.

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