Just when you thought the Trimems blog was dead...
OK, I've been pretty remiss about entries on this thing but am hoping to change that over the rest of this year. While the participation has not been very high, we do see local interest growing for MEMS. Here's my take(100% my OPINION based on what I know and who I deal with) on the layout of the Triangle Academic scene:
Duke is the most active participant with the MUMPs program so I put them at the top of the local academic MEMS ladder.
Dr. Jungsang Kim's program in the Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics is a regular user of the PolyMUMPs and SOIMUMPs technologies and, occasionally, our foundry services (when we're cheap enough!)
Dr. Bruce Randall Donald seems to have established himself at Duke since moving over from Dartmouth and building the
Donald Laboratory, where he works on microscopic robots. These robots, which got some good local notoriety from an
article in The News and Observer (though they missed the local fabrication angle!), use PolyMUMPs to build the basic structure. There are certainly others at Duke doing MEMS research, I just don't know them, so it's becoming a nice program that should attract top students nationwide to pursue their MEMS research.
NC State has always been kind of a conundrum to me. The university ranks highly in annual surveys for MEMS facilities and education, yet we never seem to get any headway when trying to collaborate. It sounds like things are changing.
Dr. Yong Zhu in the
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is offering an Introduction to MEMS class this Fall and the response has been overwhelming. My opinion is that good programs are built from the ground-up, at the undergraduate level, so this news is very good. Additionally, MEMSCAP and the Triangle National Lithography Center at State(which technically is a NCSU-UNC collaboration) are working with a government customer to integrate PolyMUMPs and the sub-micron capability of the TNLC to create a sub-micron PolyMUMPs offering. Designs are being reviewed at this time with the hopes to have some results by the end of the calendar year. Professors Mark Johnson on the Materials side and Jackie Krim on the Physics side are others doing MEMS-ish research.
UNC does some MEMS though I'm not regularly in-touch with the faculty there (tried a search for "MEMS" on their website and the top links are for the Medieval & Early Modern Studies!) but is more known for the Nanotechnology work of
Dr. Zhou's group. Also, Dr. Carrie Donley is the director of the
Chapel Hill Analytical and Nanofabrication Laboratory (CHANL) which offers a pretty nifty suite of analytical tools for micro and nano structures which area researchers can access.
I realize this isn't a complete list. I'd like it to be. One goal of this blog/website is to provide a source for students to easily find out what folks are doing locally. In the coming months, I'm going to post more detailed information on the programs listed above, possibly in the words of the people above.
Bottom line to me is if we want to generate some excitement, momentum, and interest in this technology locally, it's up to us collectively to make it happen. What interests you?
Next blog entry: I'll share some good stories and observations from my travels across Europe this year in support of the EU STIMESI project. It's very interesting to compare the efforts of the EU vs. US to foster academic MEMS research.
