JC CHIAO: Hi everyone.

My name is JC Chiao.
I'm a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas
at Arlington.
My research topic is MicroElectrodeMechanical System.
And today I'm going to talk about some of our research.

This is a micro-windmill we made.

As you can see, it's very small.
It's set on a US dime so you can compare the size of the windmill.
In July, 2014, National Geographic magazine
took a picture of a windmill and compared to a Texas harvest ant.
You can see that the size of the windmill, the blades
has a diameter of 1.8 millimeter.
Here's the video shows how the windmill work.

This is showing how the windmill blades turns.

We actually use a hairdryer to blow air on the micro-windmill.

So where can we use the micro-windmill?

We propose to use this as an energy harvester to harvest airflow energy
to generate electricity, just like any windmill.
However, the special feature is because the windmill is small,
the blade mass become very small, so any air flow, such as breeze,
can turn the blade to generate energy.
Also, because they are small, they become planar devices.
So they can conform to any surface.
For example, they can cover walls or buildings.
So you can harvest the wind flow outside the building.
Or they can be packaged in small, portable electronic device,
so you can carry them anywhere, such as a smartphone, to charge the battery.
Also, they are small, so in a very small confined space,
I can have many, many devices.
We call that an array.
For example, in the back of your iPhone, we can cover 3,000 of this windmill.
That means we can increase the power by 3,000 times,
and that is a lot of power.
Also, it tolerates failure.
So if some of the windmills do not work, no big deal.
The rest of them still work and still accumulate enough energy,
unlike the big windmill.
If one of them fail, you lose all the power.
So it tolerates failure in case of any damage.
So the next question is, how do we make such a small device?
Can we train an army of ants to make them?
Of course not.
So this requires some special fabrication technique.
Before I talk about how to make them, I would
like to introduce our term, MicroElectrodeMechanical System, MEMS.
Micro means small.
Usually, when we're talking about micrometer scale,
we usually refer micrometer to micron.
For example, the diameter of your hair is about 90 to 100 microns.
Electro means electrically controllable, which
means it can be controlled by computer or a smartphone.
Mechanical usually means 3D, but here it means moving.
So that means the device has a capability to move.
System means integration.
It means you will integrate the electrical and mechanical component
into one single system.
This means we are building micro robots.

One of the examples of micro robotic device

is a MEMS mirror we made for steering laser beams.
This mirror can be controlled to project the laser light on the screen.
This is an animation showing how a micro mirror work.
The micro hinges working together to provide that motion
to lift the mirror to an upright position.

This is a video looking at from the top of this MEMS micro zero.
When electrical signal was added, the mirror
was lifted to the upright position.

So how do we make small devices?

It cannot be done by hand.
It has to be done by a chemical process.
To illustrate, I'm showing you the cross section and top view of our device.
We start with a substrate, and we deposit the material on the substrate.
I'm showing here I just deposit two rectangular shape on the substrate.
Then we filled this layer by a material called sacrificial layer.
Now it become flat, and I can deposit a second layer of material
on the surface.
And here I'm showing three different objects or deposits.
Then I filled the second layer to make it flat.
Now I can deposit the third layer of material on the surface.
And then I deposit the top layer, the fourth layer, on the surface.

All this material can be a combination of different chemical compounds.

For example, here I'm showing the grey, red, and blue color are silicon.
Green and light screen are silicon dioxide, which is glass.
Glass can be dissolved by hydrofluoric acid.
So after I finish all this deposition, I can
soak my device into hydrofluoric acid, and the glass we will be dissolved.
After the device soak in hydrofluoric acid, the glass will be removed.
And now the silicon structure becomes free to move inside the device.
And these are what we call a hinge.
This is showing how the 3D hinge move out of the plane.

After the glass is etched away, the silicon structure

becomes movable in the hinge.
And here's a picture of a real MEMS hinge.
Remember, it's very small.
So even a regular output optical microscope cannot see it clearly.
So we have to use something called scanning
electron microscope to take this photo.
The dashed line here shows the movable hinge inside the device.
And this is compared to the diameter of a human hair.
So what can we do with the MEMS technique?
With a combination of micro hinges and three-dimensional structure,
we can have creative MEMS system.
For example, in my research group, we had made a 3D micro Cowboys stadium.
We can fit the entire Cowboys stadium on a 1 centimeter
by 1 centimeter silicon chip.
In the middle of the field is a three-dimensional Cowboy helmet
standing vertically on a thermal actuator.
The actuator can be controlled by electrical currents.
So when we pass the currents, the helmet will move up and down,
like a real robotic device.

With imagination, we can realize many three-dimensional mechanical structures

using MEMS fabrication technique.
For example, we had demonstrated a circular hinge, a seesaw bar that
can behave like a switch, a UTA blazer on silicon wafer,
and the reconfigurable antenna that can scan the radar beams.
Also we make a three-dimensional platform
behave as a variable capacitor that can tune the radio
and a actuator that can transports three-dimensional objects
on the substrate.

There are infinitive possibility to use these three-dimensional MEMS

devices in applications.
Just to give you a few examples, in medicine
we can incorporate the three-dimensional mechanical devices into endoscope.
So the doctor can use this tool to perform microsurgery through mouth,
esophagus, into the stomach.
And this way, the doctor do not need to create an incision in patient.
And this will reduce the patient's suffering greatly.
Also, the device are very small.
They can be implanted into the tissue without causing injury.
For example, my group has made this micro probe
to record neuron signal in brain or spine.
This will help us to understand how pain signal propagates in brain or spine
so we can develop new methods to reduce the chronic pain.
Also, the MEMS device are very small.
They're comparable to the size of cancer cell.
So we can create micro environment to study how cancer cell migrate
or grow in this environment.
This will help the researcher to develop new drug to stop cancer spreading.

To understand more, or if you want more information, you can visit my website.
And thank you very much for your attention.