Achievements of Japanese micromachine projects

As part of an Industrial Science and Technology Frontier Program, the National R&D Project "Micromachine Technology" is planned for ten years and divided into two phases. At the first phase that ended on March in 1996, multidisciplinary micromachine technology has been subjected to a basic examination to improve peripheral technologies including fabrication and assembling technologies, micromechanism technologies, sensor technologies and energy supply. At the subsequent phase, micromachine systems were produced on an experimental basis using those technologies so that the potential task of the systematization technology is identified. Such tasks identified through production of the micromachine systems have been studied for further development.