The 18th World Micromachine Summit (MMS 2012) was held in Hsinchu City, Taiwan.

The 18th World Micromachine Summit (MMS 2012) was held in Hsinchu City, Taiwan from 23th to 26th in April.

The Micromachine Summit (was first organized in 1995) provides the latest snapshot of a Micro-Nano (including MEMS) Technology to the worldwide industrial, academic and governmental initiatives. Delegations from the most important regions and countries in the MEMS/Nano-Microtechnology participate in this Summit. Chief delegates were to address the current technological and political topics of each country, and also the delegates were to address the special interest and discuss the progress of the special issues in each country and region. The organizer of this Micromachine Summit was Prof. Weileun Fang from Taiwan National Tsing Hua University. The Hsinchu City is one of state-of-the-art technological region of the Taiwan, which leads the world of microelectronics industry. ITRI(Industrial Technology Research Institute) is an example and has 6,000 research staffs. And this institute supported high-technology 350 start-up companies including TSMC and UMC. This is the most remarkable model of open-innovation in the world. This leads to an unusual schedule including two-day technical tours, which is unlikely in normal MM summit.

The hotel in the venue

The poster of MM2012 at the lobby



 The Japanese delegates were five, and Prof. Isao Shimoyama was the chief delegate. The largest delegates were China (10 delegates), and the next were from Germany (8 delegates), Taiwan (8 delegates), followed by Italy (6 delegates) and Japan. The 75 delegates from 20 countries attended this MMS2012. There were 13 exhibitors and 48 presentations were reported.  As a morning session on April 24, we had three opening addresses of Dr. Kuan-Hsiu Hsiao, Deputy Director-general of Hsinchu science park, Dr. Min-Shyong Lin of Founder of APM Inc, and  Prof. Weileun Fang, General Chair of MMS 2012.

In this morning session after opening addresses, 18 country reviews were presented. These country reviews were useful to take the snapshot of the R & D strategy, industrial direction of each country in very short time.  The most impressive fact was that USA, Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, Taiwan, China and Korea have invested to MEMS R&D and common facilities constantly. Afternoon session of 24, April was “Eco-systems for Micro Technologies” with 10 talks. One of presentation from Germany was an introduction of Frame Work 2020, and the 60% of the attendance of project are come from small-size companies.

Picture of meeting (1)

Picture of meeting (2)

The morning session of 25, April was “Current status and Future Perspective” with 11 talks. In this session, the world class state-of-the-art MEMS products and R & D current status were introduced among the short time. These talks include such as an AIM process without SOI wafers from memsfab in Germany, micro TAS and bio-MEMS from NMT in Netherlands, RF sensor-smart-system named E-BRAINS from Germany and so on.

As far as I know, this is the first time to carry out of the panel discussion in this MM summit. The modulator was Prof. Gianchandani, the chief delegate from USA, and the subjects of discussion were, start-up-company, foundry, and market types including market-pull and market-push and national funds. These were so many new ideas including what is key factor of success for start-up-company, the assistant term of funding, and process platform of MEMS foundry.

The MMS 2013 will be held in Shanghai. You will find the new wave of R & D especially in Asia and can take a snapshot of both the country-strategy and the state-of-the-art technologies in MEMS/MicroNano area. (MIF, Micromachine center, Takashi Mihara)