Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems
Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) integrate microscale mechanical structures with electronic, optical, acoustic, and thermal transduction to enable on-chip sensing, signal processing, actuation, energy conversion, and computation. The critical scientific and engineering challenge of this research thrust is to engineer multiphysics microsystems with high transduction efficiency, low loss, and reliable operation across extreme frequency, temperature, power, and environmental regimes, while integrating heterogeneous materials and electronics at scale. Advances in this area have applications in wireless front ends, biomedical sensing and ultrasound, inertial and acoustic sensors, harsh-environment instrumentation, power conversion, quantum and optomechanical microsystems, programmable mechanical materials, and hardware platforms for mechanical computing. The University of Texas at Austin has strong research expertise in thin-film piezoelectric microsystems, micromachined acoustic and ultrasonic transduction, optical readout and optomechanical sensing, harsh-environment microsystem engineering, tunable-stiffness MEMS metamaterials, MEMS-based mechanical neural networks, and heterogeneous micro/nanoscale design, manufacturing, and integration.