1989 Publications

1986 | 1989

The year 1989 goes down in history as the year of an enormously influential demonstration for the MEMS field. It was in this year that we demonstrated the first electrostatic-comb driven folded-beam micromechanical resonator, a device and concept that now permeates commercial products in MEMS. I was lucky enough to be an undergraduate research assistant working with Bill Tang and advised by Prof. Roger Howe at the time. These formative days generated so many great memories as we discovered all sorts of things, from stiction to just how much motional current arises from a resonating device to how difficult it was initially to detect that motional current in the presence of parasitic feedthrough current many times larger than it. If those of you reading this ever have a chance to be a gopher on a cool project, take it!

W. C. Tang, T.-C. H. Nguyen, and R. T. Howe, “Laterally driven polysilicon resonant microstructures,” Proceedings, IEEE Micro Electromechanical Systems Workshop, Salt Lake City, Utah, Feb. 1989, pp. 53-59.

W. C. Tang, T.-C. H. Nguyen, and R. T. Howe, “Laterally driven polysilicon resonant microstructures,” Sensors and Actuators, 20, 25-32, 1989. (8 pages)