BYU team leaders Linton Salmon, associate dean of engineering and technology, and John Harb, associate professor of chemical engineering, say they achieve these improvements through a new production process. Robert Huber, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Utah and a member of the workshop's program committee, says Salmon's paper was selected because it represents new and innovative work of high quality that could potentially impact the field. There's no point in building a MEMS product if there is no energy source correspondingly small enough to power it. When Salmon returned to BYU, he and his colleagues set out to fill that empty niche. The BYU team plans to commercialize the technology through Bipolar Technologies, a Provo company started by BYU graduate Rodney LaFollette.
Vehicles have and are going to have an increasing number of sensors.
Information gathered by sensors will be processed by an onboard computer. Knowing the condition of a vehicle will translate into real consumer savings, LaFollette says. I am excited about all the application possibilities the microbatteries bring with them. Salmon is equally enthusiastic. If you need to implant a sensor into a person's body, you don't want connecting wires leaving the body.