Some Info on MEMS
Sensors: The Third Driver of the Digital Revolution
" We're beginning to see the shape of the third revolution. The next big event will be shaped by a third enabling technology, and that's the arrival of really cheap sensors. It's things like video cameras the size of walnuts and cheap enough to be used once and thrown away. And moreover, under deeper technology like MEMS (microelectronic mechanical systems), MEMS looks like a very promising way to build ultra-cheap sensors that sense things like pressure and temperature and fluid flow and acceleration. You'll see it hit first in Detroit. Right now the most popular thing to steal out of automobiles isn't stereos (thanks to the microprocessors, they're too cheap to bother to steal), it's airbags because the airbag sensor is a very expensive bulky device. It's mechanical and awkward. Frankly, it's quite primitive. You could use MEMS technology to build a more accurate sensor that's more accurate and more reliable and cost a fraction of what those airbag sensors cost today. And so suddenly we're headed into this world, a third age enabled by sensors, where suddenly our devices are aware of the world around us. It's a world, for example, of cheap video cameras, but that doesn't mean video cameras where we're all staring at each other on the screens with video conferencing. Something AT&T has tried to do for decades with no result, but rather a world of cameras aimed at everything everywhere, and also hooked to the Internet. So you're not looking at other people necessarily, though you'll certainly do that. Sensors everywhere will constantly report back on what's happening." Source: Paul Saffo, "Networking Forum: December 5," interview on November 21, 1995 that appears on the IBM Web Site "Let me say there will be a demand for a different kind of 500-channel TV. But it won't be 500 channels, it will be 50,000 or more channels all individually pumped out of homes and businesses in much the same way as computer bulletin boards work today. The real action is direct connect: video to PC. These will be computer/video boards -- the VBBS. ... This is the future: TV cameras everywhere all accessible over dial-up lines."
Source: John C. Dvorak, Dvorak Predicts, Osborne McGraw Hill, 1994, p. 123 |
