Shrinking thinking

Moves are afoot to make very small, complex products - many for medical markets – that are cheap enough to be disposable

It is one thing to make very small components, but quite another to assemble them into micro products cheap enough to be disposable, and reliable enough to be ingested or implanted in human beings.

The challenges in developing such products lie both in the need to understand the difference between ordinary size devices and those that are very small, as well as developing machines and technologies capable to making and verifying them in large numbers at low cost.

With large markets in view, research and development is well underway, both in academia, industry, and in joint research projects embracing both. This is especially so in the medical device field, which - with more and more people globally wanting to live longer and better - is likely to continue to expand, regardless of whatever happens to the rest of the world economy.

Author
Tom Shelley

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