ABSTRACT
Engineers and doctors foresaw very early the need for miniaturizing devices that penetrate the human body, recognizing that any amount of penetration would be an invasion of a foreign body. ese penetrating devices would range from “passive implants,” such as dental implants, to “active implants,” such as microelectrodes. As a result, the eld of BioMEMS produced early on a plethora of implantable microdevices using traditional silicon micromachining. Not all the envisioned devices were as useful as doctors would have liked them to be because, as it turned out, the materials that were used in their development were not biocompatible for long-term human use. It would require a few more decades of research to ne-tune or redesign most of these processes.
