During the last thirty years microelectronics changed our lives
and work significantly and consequently one should wonder
about the potential of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)
that contain hundreds or even thousands of components. Would
the impact of microprocessors with the ability of processing
chemical or biological information within minutes or hours
instead of weeks or years not be just as remarkable as the impact
of modern electronic microprocessors processing electric
information within milliseconds instead of weeks? [1] And would
an enhancement of imaging array systems for media presenta-
tions to provide additional mechanical impressions not be a
comparable step forward? However, the initial expectation that
modified semiconductor fabrication technologies would be
readily adapted to many other large-scale integration applications
(LSI, 100 to 10 000 components) has only been fulfilled in very
few cases such as the digital micromirror devices (DMD). [2] For
most other microactuator applications the semiconductor
technology is too expensive and does not offer sufficient
performance and/or the necessary functionalities. Polymeric
MEMS and their inexpensive fabrication techniques could offer a
solution to this. [3] The first concept to fabricate and control
microfluidic LSI devices based on poly(dimethylsiloxane)
(PDMS) was presented by Quake et al.[4] These devices consist
of an integrated fluidic circuit controlled by several pneumatically
driven control layers and are preferably used in high-throughput
screening applications, simultaneously performing thousands of
identical operations. [5] Using pneumatic row and column
multiplexers these devices can individually address a large
number of elements, while a simultaneous control of several
random elements is not possible. [6]
Here, we present a further material-based approach of
polymeric large-scale integrated MEMS based on a stimu-
li-responsive polymer, which itself acts as the active functional
unit, i.e., the actuator. These devices provide a simple single-
layer set-up and allow simultaneous but individual control of a
large number of random elements. Using an imaging array
system, a so-called ‘‘artificial skin’’, as example we demonstrate
the generation of visual and physical artificial impressions of
a surface.