Grab the medical MEMS opportunity
Indeed, imagine a well being appliance that is similar to the mobile phone – or even part of the mobile phone – continuously monitoring vital signs and health markers and helping initiate positive actions.
The technology behind such things as massively parallel DNA sequencing, to provide personalized genomic information, is being developed now. Similarly cancer cell detection, ingestible camera pills and so on (see MEMS set to change medicine at IEDM). The technology is the necessary condition to allow personalized remote medicine but what really makes it become ubiquitous is going to be commercial scaling, mostly likely using silicon manufacturing.
Futurologists and casual pundits often focus on the technology breakthroughs when they try to foretell the future. Will we have teleportation or air-powered monorails using linear magnets? More important to forecasting the future is spotting the more mundane technologies for which the price could reduce by an order of magnitude or more.
There are two examples of technologies that have traveled down this path and changed the world and both are present inside the mobile phone: the CCD and CMOS image sensor and the inertial MEMS sensor. I was writing about both technologies in the 1980s but back then they were low volume, high value components likely to be used in industrial or mil-aerospace applications. Very few observers at the time, myself included, saw them as being as transformative as digital electronics. But these sensors are now selling in billions of units per year, outselling the microprocessor by volume if not by value, and Europe has market leaders in the form of STMicroelectronics and Robert Bosch.
Medical MEMS components are about to embark on the same path. The question is who is going to grab the commercial opportunity?
Europe is in the middle of a crisis of confidence in electronics manufacturing. Europe has excellent people, excellent academic institutions that produce plenty of technology breakthroughs but when it comes to commercializing those developments in electronics there has been a reluctance to think globally, a reluctance to invest for critical mass – in short a reluctance to compete.
I will not speculate too long as to why that is, and the actions, attitudes and outcomes do differ from region to region. Clearly the situation differs between Eastern Europe, Germany, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean countries and so on. Nonetheless, the European Commission’s goal that Europe will be responsible for 20 percent of global integrated circuit production by 2020 is a clearly a "stretch" target. Who will build the fabs necessary to expand Europe’s production and where will the money come from?
The fact is the digital IC market has matured greatly in recent years and the manufacturing leaders are clearly identifiable and they are not European. But while the likes of Intel, TSMC, Samsung and Globalfoundries are wondering where to locate their next $15 billion wafer fab, European companies have the opportunity to build 200- and 300-mm wafer fabs to make medical MEMS.
The costs will be much lower. The returns, in the long-term, promise to much higher as the technology looks set to catapult humanity into an era of ubiquitous, personalized medicine supported by an army of bioMEMS. And depending on how you measure the IC market it could count towards the European Commission’s 20 percent target.
Related links and articles:
MEMS set to change medicine at IEDM
MEMS pioneer wins SEMI Europa prize
European Commission repeats call for "Airbus of chips"
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