Abstract: MEMS are ubiquitous – there are over 100 MEMS components in your cellphone, car and DLP projectors. But did you know there are MEMS in your Airpods, VR headsets, (toy)drones and Switch/PS5 gaming consoles? Even more exciting is that most of the state-of-the-art MEMS are designed and manufactured in the United States.
Being at the forefront of MEMS technologies doesn’t mean we become complacent. We must continue to innovate. And that involves two thrusts. At DARPA I am advocating an initiative aimed at pushing MEMS sensor, actuator and transducer performance towards their ultimate limits, only limited by the laws of Physics and Materials. At Purdue, the OxideMEMS Lab is focused on hybridizing MEMS technologies with other domains. In this talk I will discuss some of the initiatives undertaken in the OxideMEMS Lab to explore inter-domain coupling in Opto-mechanical, Spin-Acoustic and Atom-MEMS devices. We strive to leverage our understanding of these coupled systems to design and fabricate inertial sensors, clocks, frequency combs and computing and microwave sub-systems.
The work is performed in close collaboration with Professor Tobias Kippenberg at EPFL, Professor Greg Fuchs at Cornell, Professor Chen-Lung Hung at Purdue and BAE Fast Labs.
Bio: Sunil Bhave received Bachelor of Science and doctorate degrees from the University of California Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer sciences in 1998 and 2004 respectively. In April 2015, he joined the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Bhave received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award in 2007, DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) in 2008, IEEE Ultrasonics Young Investigator Award in 2014, Google Faculty Research Award in 2020 and IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society’s 2023 Walter G. Cady Award. Sunil joined DARPA in August 2023 as a program manager in the Defense Sciences Office.