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Researchers at the University of Texas Arlington have developed tiny "micro-windmills" so small that ten of them can fit on one grain of rice. If you were to glue a hundred of them onto a cell phone case and hold it out the window, researcher J.C. Chiao says, you could potentially revive your dead phone in just a few minutes. The 1.8mm-wide windmills look pretty fragile, but UTA says that their flexible nickel alloy components can stand up to strong winds without fracturing.
Rao’s designs blend origami concepts into conventional wafer-scale semiconductor device layouts so complex 3-D moveable mechanical structures can be self-assembled from two-dimensional metal pieces utilizing planar multilayer electroplating techniques that have been optimized by WinMEMS Technologies Co., the Taiwanese fabrication foundry that took an initial interest in Rao’s work.
The micro-windmills can be made in an array using the batch processes. The fabrication cost of making one device is the same as making hundreds or thousands on a single wafer, which enables for mass production of very inexpensive systems.