Sandia spins off company to market MEMS technology

17 Jun 2002

Sandia National Laboratories of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has spun off a company, MEMX Inc, to commercialize laboratory-developed microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).

The new company will initially focus on producing optical switches for the telecoms industry using Summit V - a five-level polysilicon-surface MEMS technology.

Sandia's vice-president, Al Romig, described the spin-off as a "bold and important move", that was in line with the company's core mission.

"We believe that commercialization of our MEMS technology is critical for us to achieve our national-security mission," he said. "National-security decision makers want to see the technology used in applications such as cars or televisions before they consider it for use in weapons. Getting the technology out of the lab and into commercial applications will give us the confidence to deploy it in critical defense applications."

The company predicts that the growth in demand for e-commerce and multimedia applications over the Internet will continue for at least another 20 years. Companies, such as Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, Marconi and Corning, are racing to develop optical routers and optical-switching systems to meet this demand.

Switching data is traditionally performed electronically, which destroys the wide bandwidth advantage of optical fiber. Optical switches eliminate this problem.

MEMX's chief technical officer, Paul McWhorter said: "Because they [MEMS] are batch-fabricated using standard integrated-circuit-manufacturing techniques, MEMS offer an affordable technique for creating large arrays of high-performance mirrors on a single silicon chip. Standard switches that are used in fiber optics can cost up to USD 1000 per channel. If you use 1000 channels, the cost is USD 1 million. Using MEMS technology, you can put 1000 mirrors on one chip, which can be built for just a few dollars."