Review on Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS)

MEMS is an acronym for micro- electro mechanical systems. This technology was first introduced in the 1980s and since then it’s used to produce very small sensors and actuators whose size is in microns. These micro size transducers are capable to be blended with the signal conditioning or processing in electronics circuitry to form a system which can perform real time processing like the distributed control etc. MEMS are mainly based on silicon as their basic element and these have a long list and variety of applications where they can be used such as, mobile equipment, automobile sensors and actuators, printers, networking and sensor arrays and medical applications etc. Being extremely small in size, they have a small footprint hence consume very little space on chip compared to conventional sensors and the size can be related to the power consumption as well, most of the MEMS need power in Milli-Watts range hence the efficiency of the devices also gets improved and we can get more operation time using the same power supply like a battery or cell. This paper is a review related to the importance of MEMS in our day-to-day life, the current trends in small scale and largescale industries and the future scope of this technology in various applications is also been discussed.