Seminar courses open window into MEMS technology and its business side

Emily M. Smith
ASME NEWS

ASME's annual MEMS Technology Seminar is scheduled to take place June 17-19 at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, Mass.

The seminar is for mechanical engineers and researchers, chemical engineers and chemists, electrical engineers, government and private laboratoriezs, manufacturers, research and development firms, as well as investment and financial executives.

During the seminar, four courses will be offered: BioMEMS, MEMS Packaging, Microfluidics and Lab on a Chip, and Photonics. A brief outline of each course follows.
In BioMEMS, attendees will gain an in-depth understanding of biomedical MEMS. The course will begin with an introduction to the microelectromechanical field and a tutorial on the fundamentals of MEMS device fabrication.

Attendees will get detailed insight into bioMEMS and the unique features of these micromachines in terms of design, materials and fabrication techniques. Specific application areas will also be covered in detail, such as implantable drug delivery, biomimetic interfaces, tissue engineering and microsurgical tools.

The commercialization of bioMEMS will also be discussed, along with the biocompatibility aspects of bioMEMS, systems integration issues and future directions of the field.

The course directors are Abraham Lee, a professor at the Center for Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine, and Gisela Lin, a sales engineer with the BioMEMS Business Unit of Standard MEMS Inc.

The MEMS Packaging course will provide basic and advanced packaging topics and solutions for various MEMS devices. An overview of MEMS manufacturing technologies and related packaging issues will be given at the beginning of the course.

Specific MEMS packaging requirements and solutions for key MEMS commercial products
will then be addressed by experienced researchers from various industry sectors.

Hermetical sealing, accelerated testing and vacuum encapsulation skills will also be discussed in this course, along with advanced approaches for MEMS packaging and assembly, integration issues and future directions.

The course director will be Liwei Lin, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although Microfluidics is an enabling technology that can have a strong impact on biochemical analysis on chips, researchers need to understand the behaviors of fluid flow in nano/micro channels, which differ greatly from the macro scale.

This course will cover the fundamentals of microfluidics for beginners to the applications of microfluidics for end users. Course participants will learn designing, modeling, fabricating and characterizing microfluidic components. That will be followed by training in the application of fundamental concepts of microfluidics to practical lab-on-a-chip, DNA/ protein chips and clinical diagnostic biochips.

Chong H. Ahn, who is director of microsystems and bioMEMS at the University of Cincinnati, will be the course director.

Although microelectronic and photonic packaging typically involves electrical and optical engineers, mechanical and materials engineers can be equally successful in both fields, once they learn how to apply methods of mechanical and materials engineering to this area and understand the mechanical and reliability problems encountered in microelectronics and photonics.

Upon completing the Photonics and Lab on a Chip course, participants will be able to better understand the reliability problems in, and mechanical behavior of, typical microelectronics, optoelectronics and photonics structures subjected to thermally induced, mechanical or dynamic loading.

The course will provide simple and easy-to-apply formulas that can be used during the design process. These formulas indicate the roles of different materials and geometrical factors affecting the mechanical behavior and reliability of a packaging structure, and can be effectively used prior to, and often instead of, computer-aided modeling or experimental analyses.

Ephraim Suhir, who is a vice president of reliability and packaging at Iolon Inc., and the founder and editor-in-chief of ASME's Journal of Electronic Packaging, will be the course director.

All courses begin at 8:30 a.m. and end at 4:30 p.m., except Photonics, which begins at 8 a.m. A daily luncheon is included.

The per-course cost to attend is $1,295 for members and $1,445 for nonmembers. The cost will be $1,095 for members who are academics and $1,245 for nonmember academics.
For information about the course instructors, the daily schedule for the seminar, or to register, visit www.asme.org/education/techsem/mems.htm or call (800) 843-2763 or e-mail Jennifer Burns, burnsj@asme.org.

Tabletop exhibits and sponsorships are also available during the MEMS Technology Seminar. Current exhibitors and sponsors include Corning IntelliSense and Lab-on-a-Chip.com.

For more information, visit www. asme.org/education/techsem/ mems.htm or contact Jennifer Burns at burnsj@asme.org.

Cited from ASME NEWS