MEMS and MST

Hobby activity A personal hobby of our CEO and technical manager, Jan Söderkvist, has been to increase the awareness of MEMS and its possibilities. For example, he initiated and coordinated the Micro Structure Bulletin (MSB), the Micro Structure Workshop (MSW), and the MikroStrukturKurs (MSK). These initiatives have been well received and have become associated with Colibri despite that MEMS is outside Colibri's main business focus.

Mentorship and Support for MEMS

Mentorship and support Our extensive experience of MEMS (1985-) comes from participating in many industrial and academic projects that is/were enabled by micro-parts. Our involvement has been mainly on a system level, and as a troubleshooter and advisor for topics such as those listed on the page ‘Competence Areas’. Our MEMS-related experience is open for sharing via Colibri's mentorship and support program.

What is MEMS and MST?

Dimensions MicroElectroMechanical System(s) (MEMS) and MicroSystem Technology (MST) denote systems that include one or more small microstructures (sub-µm to mm) that often are fabricated using a technology named micromachining, and materials, that originates partly from the semiconductor industry's processes and partly from precision mechanics. This new technology is of high interest if you wish to miniaturize existing systems, improve reliability, reproducibility and robustness, reduce system-costs for high-volume applications, add new features, minimize energy, sample and resource consumption, or just acquire a new strategic competence area. MEMS and MST open a multi-billion dollar market in areas such as IT (heads for inkjets and hard disk drives, etc.), medicine and biochemistry (hearing aids, pacemakers, in vitro diagnostics, drug delivery, etc.) and automotive (sensors for pressure, acceleration, gas, etc.). Find explanations to MEMS-related words you might wonder about and explore a few consequences of scaling flying beings.

MSx - A Past Initiative of Colibri to Support Nordic MEMS

MSx was a popular initiative of Jan Söderkvist and Colibri to support the industrial development of Nordic MEMS. The concept included workshops, newsletters, courses, etc (MSW, MSB, MSK, ...). A complication was that MSx relied on a single person's hobby activity and was run on a non-profit basis. As easily realized, this is not a realistic long-term solution.

A new professional concept for MSx was created in 2002/2003 that included an excellent new team, collaboration with media, and several other new and interesting ingredients. The response was very positive. Unfortunately, our wish to create a sound long-term financial platform with a foundation of national support was more complicated than expected, especially considering that support to the electronics industry in general was not on the Swedish government's agenda at that time. Thus, it was decided in March 2003 to permanently discontinue MSB. The last issue, MSB 99:4-00:2, was published in December 1999. Old issues are available on MSB's official download website.

A positive decision is that MSW will continue as a stand-alone activity. The successes of previous workshops (1994, 1996, 1998, 2002, ...) have generated high expectations for coming workshops, especially among industry. Starting in 2002, the target has been to let MSW focus more on industry, to let it rotate between main MEMS-locations, to have local organizers, and to have an industrial-dominated program committee. Read more on Colibri's MSW-site.

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