ABSTRACT
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................61
References........................................................................................................................................61
In his milestone talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” given to the American Physical
Society at the California Institute of Technology in 1959 [24], Nobel laureate Richard Feynman
revealed an exciting picture of an entirely new world “at the bottom” for generations of people to
explore. Feynman predicted the emergence of the micromachines that have now begun to flourish
and that play an increasingly important role in many areas of science and technology today. Four
decades later, scientists and engineers from many different disciplines have created machines
(which usually mean “large, slow, and expensive”) and integrated circuit devices (which usually
mean “small, fast, and cheap”) that have combined beautifully with each other, creating the term
microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Although MEMS-related research began as early as the
1950s, it was not until the 1990s that MEMS made its way from being a laboratory curiosity to
becoming commercialized/developed in many industries, including the automobile, medical, elec-
tronics, communication, and defense industries [52].
