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Technology Stocks : ADI: The SHARCs are circling! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BostonView who wrote (2245)	10/5/2000 4:13:03 PM
From: Jim Oravetz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2882

Wow, I bet they can not wait till the tax man comes calling after every employee gets $3.76M!! Here is some backgnd info on MEMs with some projections going forward. Lots of pie charts. FWIW MST vs. MEMS: Where Are We? More than 70 percent of MSTs shipped to IT market in 1999 by J. Eric Gulliksen MicroStructures (or MicroSystems) Technology (MST) is an outgrowth of semiconductor technology. It was found, more than 20 years ago, that selective doping and etching could produce three-dimensional elements on a silicon wafer and that, by utilizing "sacrificial" layers, it was possible to selectively undercut some of these elements to allow them to "float" above the surface of the substrate. One of the first U.S. patents describing an invention in the field was issued to IBM in 1980 (Patent No. 4,229,732, Hartstein, et al., Micromechanical Display Logic and Array). Extension of the processes described in the patent and in other literature led many to speculate that, whereas VLSI semiconductors would be the "brains" of devices of the future, MST would provide their five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch). Therefore, being an enabling technology, MST would quickly become ubiquitous, resulting in the emergence of an industry equal in magnitude to semiconductors. However, rapid growth did not materialize as expected. MicroElectroMechanical Systems, known in the United States as MEMS, comprise a subset of MST. These are distinguished from MST in that a "true," or "traditional," MEMS device includes one or more moving or deformable elements. The first mention of MEMS in a U.S. patent was in 1988 (Patent No. 4,738,250, Fulkerson, et al., Apparatus and Method for Micro-Electric Medical Stimulation of Cells of Living Animal Tissue, assigned to Mems Technology Inc., Minneapolis, Minn.). The term MEMS has not been adopted by much of the rest of the world, which retains the use of the broader MST to describe the technology. semi.org Jim