Opportunities for microtechnology in metrology

The vast infrastructure of the microelectronic and microtechnological processing industry has yielded highly reproducible devices through reliable, reproducible, and fabrication-compatible processing techniques. Much development has occurred in bulk and surface micromachining, as well as in thin-film deposition techniques. Nevertheless, only a limited number of metrological applications have benefited from the use of this technology. Only two metrological applications that use microtechnology have been developed into commercially available devices: the JJA, as a DC reference, and the thermal RMS-to-DC converter, as an AC reference. Single electron tunneling devices and micromachined electrostatic RMS-to-DC converters are still under development. The accuracy requirements of the existing applications will continue to increase. This makes the development of on-chip references and on-chip self-test and self-calibration facilities essential. These microelectronic features, until now have remained unexploited in metrology, as well as in most other applications.