AN ENGINE ON EVERY CHIP.

INTERNAL combustion engines; INTEGRATED circuits; ELECTROMECHANICAL devices; MICROFABRICATION; ELECTRICAL engineering; FERNANDEZ-Pello, Carlos

Having shrunk an internal combustion engine to centimetre scales, the next challenge for Carlos Fernandez-Pello of the University of California, Berkeley, is to shrink it even further. "The dream is to have an engine on a chip," he says. His goal is to get about 30 milliwatts of electrical power from an engine that could one day be mass-produced using techniques now used for micro-electromechanical systems such as the mirrors-on-a-chip used in video projectors. The best the Berkeley team has managed so far is an engine 900 micrometres thick with a rotor 2.4 millimetres in diameter, fashioned using silicon micro-fabrication technology.