IN A QUIET corner of Microsoft’s sprawling campus in Redmond, Washington
state, you can forget Windows. The aim of the Microsoft Research Hardware
Laboratories is to dream up new ideas. And, as Â鶹´«Ã½ has
discovered, they have delivered the goods. The lab has developed a new type of
micromotor that could become a workhorse in the switching centres essential to
the optical Internet of the future.
The minuscule motors produce many times the force available from today’s puny
micromachines, while taking up less room on a chip, says Microsoft research
engineer Michael Sinclair.
Micromotors are needed to drive microelectromechanical…
