As reported in Physics Web, scientists from Chalmers University of Technology and the Institute of Microelectronics in Gothenburg built their pinball machine on a one-inch-square piece of silicon that has a tilt of 20 degrees. The “pinballs” were placed in the machine “by hand” and are so small that a half-dozen of them side-by-side would barely measure a single millimeter. The MEMS “flippers” on the game can strike the “pinballs” so hard they travel at almost a kilometer per hour. While this may not seem very fast, expressed as ball-diameters-traveled-per-second it’s equivalent to throwing a football fast enough to break the sound barrier.
“The pinball games are used for demonstrating this simple and easy [manufacturing] process,” pinball teammember Martin Brings said. “It also demonstrates some of the effects that occur on the micrometer level, such as small apparent inertia.” The team says that the process could be used to build devices such as spatial light modulators,or micromotors, or most likely something that hasn’t even been conceived…yet.
Details on the micro-pinball machine effort are published in the current issue of Journal of Micromechanical Microengineering.