Bill Parker, co-founder of Waitsfield's Creative MicroSystems, was invited to attend the third International Workshop on Innovation and Commercialization of Micro & Nanotechnology (ICMAN2009), held in Chongqing in central China, where he gave a presentation on the use of holography for making complex three-dimensional microsystems. The four-day event gathered well-known researchers, company executives and engineers, as well as venture capital and government representatives from all over the world.
Parker's participation stemmed from speaking at a conference at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was invited to attend by a professor in the mechanical engineering department whom he met at a U.S. conference. Parker put together a paper on Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS).
"MEMS are used for different applications. They are used in automobiles, in airbags, in Wii games and other uses. There is a Chinese company that makes a 'pill' that you swallow, a MEMS endoscope. It goes through your gastrointestinal tract and takes real-time images of what it sees," Parker said.
"We're going to work with this Chinese company on the 'pill' to put sensors in it so that when a surgeon, watching the pill move through your body, sees something, the 'pill' has the ability to grab some cells for biopsy or even to analyze them on the spot," he explained.
The pills cost an estimated $3,000 apiece as they are currently configured and are used over and over. Thus far, 10,000 have been sold in China. Parker said they have not been approved by the FDA for use in the United States.
Creative MicroSystems will work on the hardware for this project and is one member of a larger group of international organizations. As part of the overall event (sponsored by the Chongqing government offices for Science and Technology Development) from which Parker just returned, Creative MicroSystems Corp. became a member of the Strategic Innovation Alliance of Medical MEMS (SIAMM).
The goal of SIAMM is to develop and industrialize MEMS specifically for applications in the medical area. The collaboration will develop, manufacture and globally market miniaturized medical devices using technology and capabilities of its partner organizations. With Parker at the signing ceremony last month were scientists, researchers, business owners and others from Korea, Germany, France, Russia and China.
In his Waitsfield laboratories, Parker and his staff are working on the technology to enhance the MEMS pill while also working on creating the machinery to make the enhanced MEMS pill, including using hologram images to increase the density of how data is embedded in microchips.
Using holograms, Parker explained, takes away the need for ever-larger lenses to imprint increasingly dense information on chips. Creating imprinted holograms with lenses in them will have an impact on medical microtechnology, he said. In addition to the MEMS work, Parker is working on three-dimensional solar cells that maximize the capture of light and increase the efficiency of solar cells.
Parker lives in Waitsfield with his wife Julie, also a scientist, and their children. He serves on the Waitsfield Select Board.
{loadnavigation}
