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30 MEMS and Microstructures in Aerospace Applications

requirements imposed by the need to first survive the rigors of the short-term
dynamic space launch environment as well as the long-term on-orbit operating
environments found in various mission regimes. Chapter 4 of this book is intended
to provide just such a broad general background on the space environment and will
be a valuable reference for MEMS technologists. In a complementary effort, the
space system professionals in industry and in government, to whom the demanding
space environmental requirements are routine, must do a much better job of guiding
the MEMS technology community through the hurdles of designing, building, and
qualifying space hardware.
The establishment of much closer working relationships between MEMS tech-
nologists and their counterparts in industry is certainly called for. Significantly
more industry–university collaborations, focused on transitioning MEMS micro-
systems and devices out of the university laboratories, will be needed to spur the
infusion of MEMS technology into future space missions. It is envisioned that these
collaborative teams would target specific space mission applications for MEMS.
Appropriate mission assurance product reliability specifications, large-scale manu-
facturing considerations, together with industry standard mechanical or electrical
interface requirements, would be combined very early in the innovative design
process. In this type of collaboration, university-level pilot production would be
used to evaluate and path find viable approaches for the eventual large volume
industrial production process yielding space-qualified commercial-off-the-shelf
(COTS) MEMS flight hardware.
On a more foundational level, continued investment in expanding and refining
the general MEMS knowledge base will be needed. The focus here should be on
improving our understanding the mechanical and electrical behaviors of existing
MEMS materials (especially in the cryogenic temperature regimes favored by many
space-sensing applications) as well as the development of new exotic MEMS
materials. New techniques for testing materials and methods for performing stand-
ardized reliability assessments will be required. The latter need will certainly drive
the development of improved high-fidelity, and test-validated, analytical software
models. Exploiting the significant recent advances in high-performance computing
and visualization would be a logical first step here.
Another critical need will be the development of new techniques and processes
for precision manufacturing, assembly and integration of silicon-based MEMS
devices with macroscale nonplanar components made from metals, ceramics, plas-
tics, and perhaps more exotic materials. The need for improved tools, methods, and
processes for the design and development of the supporting miniature, low-power
mixed-signal (analog and digital) electronics, which are integral elements of the
MEMS devices, must also be addressed.
The investigation of innovative methods for packing and tightly integrating the
electrical drive signal, data readout, and signal conditioning elements of the MEMS
devices with the mechanical elements should be aggressively pursued. In most
applications, significant device performance improvements, along with dramatic
reductions in corrupting electrical signal noise, can be accomplished by moving the
electronics as physically close as possible to the mechanical elements of the MEMS

© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC