Fabricating MEMS and Nanotechnology

MEMS and Nano devices are extremely small—for example, MEMS and Nanotechnology has made possible electrically-driven motors smaller than the diameter of a human hair (right) -- but MEMS and Nanotechnology is not primarily about size.
MEMS and Nanotechnology is also not about making things out of silicon, even though silicon possesses excellent materials properties, which make it an attractive choice for many high-performance mechanical applications; for example, the strength-to-weight ratio for silicon is higher than many other engineering materials, which allow very high-bandwidth mechanical devices to be realized.
Instead, the deep insight of MEMS and Nano is as a new manufacturing technology, a way of making complex electromechanical systems using batch fabrication techniques similar to those used for integrated circuits, and uniting these electromechanical elements together with electronics.

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