Silicon as material for mechanical wristwatches

Silicon has been widely used as the material of choice for the fabrication of MEMS I MST devices. The compatibility of MEMS manufacturing equipment with standard IC equipment presents one ofthe main reasons for this choice. However, over the past years, we have seen new equipment dedicated to MEMS fabrication enter the market place. One such example is the Deep Reactive Ion Etcher, which is capable of vertically etching silicon at a rate of several microns per minute. This type of equipment, now available from several vendors, has revolutionized the MEMS fabrication capabilities and has opened the door to a whole new family of MEMS devices [1].