Sensors at the crossroads

We have arrived at one of those major crossroads in history, a point where, when we look back on this era years from now, we will see how the world changed fundamentally. All of the major elements involved in such a change — economics, politics, technology, the environment — are clearly in a state of flux. We do, indeed, live in interesting times.

From a technological standpoint, the nature of how man interacts with machines is undergoing a fundamental shift. In the past, we have expected machines to be mostly passive, to interact with us only when and how we told them to. But machines are now becoming more aware of their environment and what’s happening around them without us telling them. A mobile microsystem, or smart phone, is capable of telling us when a nearby shop has a sale on an item we want, and I expect they’ll soon be able to tell us when they smell smoke or detect noxious fumes. Cars tell us how to get to where we want to go and alert emergency teams when we’re in trouble, and our highways are smart enough to let us know what the road conditions ahead are. Robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but are available today to serve as our pets.

Key to this new level of capability are sensors based on MEMS devices. There’s an old rule of thumb that any truly new technology takes about 20 years of development before it’s ready to become mainstream. A fall conference, The MEMS Summit (www.memssummit.org), at Stanford University will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the seminal MEMS company NovaSensor and look at how the industry has gotten to its present state, while another conference, the annual MEMS Congress (www.memscongress.com) to be held in Scottsdale, AZ, will explore the latest developments in MEMS sensors.

If you want to be part of the future, you should plan to attend both.

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