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MICRALYNE HELPS DRIVE MEMS MANUFACTURING AND COMMERCIALIZATION.

Article Excerpt
The ability to consistently manufacture reliable, uniform devices is vital to the emergence of new MEMS products and applications and to the growth of the overall MEMS industry. MEMS designers and researchers need to access expertise in efficient, cost-effective manufacturing to enable their designs to reach the marketplace. Established MEMS companies can reduce their capital investment, overhead, and infrastructure costs, and free up engineering talent to work on new designs, by having a reliable foundry produce their products.

The MEMS foundry industry has experienced some challenges, including strong competition and an abundance of capacity, and economic uncertainty, which can constrain the expansion plans of foundry customers. The challenges in the MEMS foundry arena are evidenced by the cessation of operations at Standard MEMS circa 2002, and the fact that Corning IntelliSense is in the process of discontinuing operations.

In contrast, Micralyne, Inc. (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 780-431-4400)(www.micralyne.com), founded in 1982 as a spin-off of the University of Alberta and privatized in 1998, has been a consistently profitable MEMS manufacturing company, with a track record of transitioning MEMS development projects into manufacturable products, as well as producing existing MEMS products for other companies.

In the face of the shake-out in the MEMS foundry industry and economic uncertainty, Micralyne has reportedly achieved, on average, about a 15% annual revenue growth over the past five years. While revenue growth has been somewhat constrained in the fiscal year ended March 2004, Micralyne (whose revenues for the fiscal year ended March 2004 will be in the $10 million range) has gained new customers...

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