Your smartphone likely uses a dozen or so tiny — yet powerful — MEMS sensors to support its sophisticated functions. And that late-model car undoubtedly carries scores of devices based on MEMS and other sensing technologies.

Typically sized at the micron scale — millionths of a meter — MEMS devices use minuscule moving parts to perform a broad range of sensing tasks. Small as they are, they can detect sound, motion, position, force, pressure, chemicals, bacteria, and numerous other things worth knowing about. Note that these miniaturized sensors don’t always have moving parts, and a broader term — microsystems — is sometimes used rather than MEMS.

At Georgia Tech, more than 20 research teams focus on MEMS-related research and development. Supporting them is the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN), one of Georgia Tech’s nine Interdisciplinary Research Institutes. IEN’s extensive shared-user facilities, including advanced labs and cleanrooms, are used by as many as 200 Georgia Tech faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers who work on MEMS and other microsystems.

“More and more, our electronic systems must be aware of and even interact with their environment, and MEMS-based devices do that very well. They are the ear that detects sound and movement, the nose and tongue that detect toxic chemicals or smoke,” said Oliver Brand, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and executive director of IEN. “MEMS is like a sandbox of technologies and processes that lets us miniaturize sensors, and even put several sensing technologies onto a single chip, at low cost. It can enable many innovative applications, and it can also make conventional devices — like smoke or movement detectors — smaller, smarter, and more effective.”

Creating innovative sensors is highly interdisciplinary, Brand noted, requiring the joint efforts of electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, chemists, and biochemists — who are, in turn, supported by materials, packaging, and circuit-design experts. In addition, MEMS development is often expensive, demanding advanced facilities with device fabrication and characterization tools.

IEN enables Georgia Tech researchers to address these challenges, Brand said. Its cleanrooms and associated labs, open to Georgia Tech and non-Georgia Tech researchers, make state-of-the-art fabrication and characterization equipment widely available. As a result, most MEMS prototypes under development at Georgia Tech can be built right on campus.

To read the complete story, visit Horizons magazine at http://www.rh.gatech.edu/features/unseen-machines.