Picture air pressure sensors woven into the thread of a truck tire, or ant-sized accelerometers protecting a train from sudden speeding. Imagine shipping containers packed with invisible crash sensors, or distribution center scanners storing complete inventory data by unique-DNA identifier on the tip of a pen. More prosaic, peek at the nano-nozzles of any modern office inkjet printer, or peer underground where Lilliputian switches power the high-speed Internet connections linking Boston and Berlin, Shanghai and San Francisco.

Such devices are called microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS. ‘Micro,’ of course, means very small, and, indeed, MEMS by any name are machines made on a tiny scale. How tiny? Their largest parts are one-ten-thousandth of a meter-so compact an entire universe of them could fit in a grain of sand.

What’s new in MEMS manufacturing is the marriage of the age-old lathe and modern laser precision. Silicon may host the devices, but so may plastic, glass, quartz, and metal.

For the record, these are true machines, not tiny electronics, with holes, cavity, channels, cantilevers and membranes. Michigan-based Integrated Sensing Systems, a leading MEMS designer, took its company name from the distinction. “Integrated circuits can be thought of as the ‘brains’ of a system and MEMS augments this decision-making capability with ‘eyes’ and ‘arms,’ to allow microsystems to sense and control the environment,” explains a company white paper. “Sensors gather information from the environment through measuring mechanical, thermal, biological, chemical, optical, and magnetic phenomena.” How so? As one example, Washington-based Intermec Technologies, best known as the inventor of the world’s most widely-used bar code symbol set, now markets a MEMS-based supply chain data collection scanner able to read bar codes up to 40 times as fast as today’s legacy equipment.  Just think what that means to supply chain visibility!

Miniaturization not only adds features, it may lower costs. “Sensors and actuators are the most costly and least reliable parts of many human-scale machines and control systems,” reminds Russel Kay, writing for Computerworld. “Large devices can’t move as quickly or as precisely as microscale machines; precision in large machines is expensive and often difficult to mass-produce.”

New capabilities bring new risks-or at least new challenges. Hence, for example, the announcement this February of the first commercial “nanospecific risk management and monitoring system.” Dubbed CENARIOS, the system covers “all ‘nanorelated’ industry sectors, e.g. textiles, cosmetic, energy, packaging, food, chemical, pharmaceutical, automotive, and electronics,” says a spokesperson.

Such measures suggest a fast-maturing industry. Australia-based Global Licensing and Innovation, for one, now markets “MEMS-enabled” packaging methods to global shippers of perishable products. Their business-card-sized add-ons monitor temperature, humidity, acidity, vibration, and corrosion, allowing “detailed, continuous tracking of these environmental elements as a product moves through the supply chain.” Says a company representative, “Violations can be identified at any point during processing. This can result in reduced product wastage, improved labor savings, reduced disputes with distributors and retailers, improved customer satisfaction, and greater understanding of supply chain dynamics.”

Already microelectromechanical systems’ invisible achievements are such that a panel of technology leaders convened by CNN declared MEMS eleventh among the top twenty-five innovations of the last quarter century, ahead of automated teller machines, high-definition television, and the Space Shuttle in terms of “relevance, impact, or future potential to impact everyday Americans during the course of daily life.”

What’s next? What else but nanoelectromechanical systems, abbreviated NEMS, now largely theoretical, but designed for molecule-by-molecule manufacture, a scale to make MEMS seem positively gargantuan. If smaller is better, after all, smallest is best. wt