Commercial success in the MEMS marketplace

In order to successfully commercialize their technology, MEMS based companies will have to meet the high expectations set by the marketplace. There are four areas that need to be addressed before wide-scale commercialization of MEMS based products can occur: (1) Reliability: basically, the inherent reliability and long-term functioning of MEMS have yet to be proven beyond certain passive devices. However, for many other applications there are not enough MEMS-based products in the field that we can point to in order to alleviate this concern. (2) Manufacturability: not enough world-class MEMS manufacturing facilities have been established, so there are concerns about the ability of the industry to ramp up volumes as in the IC industry. (3) Packaging: for each application area the packaging challenge is different. In addition, packaging costs are usually considerably more expensive than the MEMS device itself. Component customers want to be convinced that these issues are being addressed and viable solutions will be available. (4) New technology: many potential customers are sitting on the fence simply because the technology is new. This is not unique to MEMS but does affect introduction of the technology.