Overview

As improvements in fabrication technology for MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) increase the availability and diversity of these micromachines, engineers are defining a growing number of tasks to which they can be put. The idea of carrying out tasks using large coordinated systems of MEMS units motivates the development of automated, algorithmic methods for designing and controlling these groups of devices. We report here on progress towards algorithmic MEMS, taking on the challenge of design, control, and programming of massively-parallel arrays of microactuators.

We report on these developments in this focused survey paper, based on the research results originally reported in our 1994 paper [24] and developed further in [19, 20, 26, 21, 17, 18, 24, 12, 14, 15, 9]. We describe how arrays of MEMS devices can move and position tiny parts, such as integrated circuit chips, in flexible and predictable ways by oscillatory or ciliary action. The theory of programmable force fields can model this action, leading to algorithms for various types of micromanipulation that require no sensing of where the part is. Experiments support the theory. We also report on how the theory and results can be generalized to the macroscopic scale [11, 10].