High tech center to combine electronic design, MEMS labs

by Mari Hersh

A CWRU microsystems resource center, tentatively called the Micro-Nanofabrication Systems Center, will combine the University's electronics design center and microfabrication lab into a single research facility.

Upon completion, the new center will focus on the design, manufacture and manipulation of microscopic and nanoscopic sensors and actuators that together could potentially perform high-tech functions ranging from the delivery of drugs into the bloodstream to alerting military personnel of activity in a remote location. The new high-tech facility is in the advanced planning stage.

"This resource center will be home to CWRU's existing expertise in silicon carbide processing-which was instrumental in the development of our miniature fuel cell-but also includes microfabrication with non-traditional materials such as metals, polymers and other inorganic and organic materials," said Robert Savinell, dean of the Case School of Engineering and George S. Dively Professor of Engineering. "The resource center will also focus on nanotechnology, which is on the cutting edge of technology and even further miniaturizes these devices."

The University will utilize the resource center to form new partnerships with regional organizations, national and global corporations and government. CWRU also plans to collaborate with those partners on high-tech research projects and the subsequent potential for and actual technology transfer.

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have already begun to revolutionize high-tech products by joining silicon-based microelectronics with micromachining technology, thereby creating complete miniature systems-on-a-chip. Savinell said CWRU's new center will go a step further and focus on nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), or the further miniaturization of these devices down to a nanoscale, which is too small for the human eye.

"The new center will offer memberships to industrial partners, thereby granting them initial access to CWRU research and a first chance at commercializing those technologies," said Savinell.

Savinell is working with a task force of CWRU professors and researchers including Chung Chiun Liu, director of the Electronics Design Center and Wallace R. Persons professor of sensor technology and controls, and Mehran Mehregany, BF Goodrich Professor of Engineering Innovation and director of the MEMS Research Program.

Mehregany began his research in Microsystems in the early 1990s and has already formed several startup companies based on his MEMS research, including Advanced MicroMachines Inc., which he sold to B.F. Goodrich in 1999.

"It's going to take a determined, coordinated, strategic partnership of the academic community, the private sector and regional and state governments to reach commercialization," Mehregany said. "Of course, we want to continue our research in support of graduate education. But instead of pushing commercialization, we want to be pulled by commercialization."

A formal search for both a director and associate director of the new center is underway.

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