Sounding Out Cool MEMS Technology

Piezoelectric MEMS technology can be applied to a range of novel applications, including implementation of a tiny speaker.

William G. Wong

Mike Housholder

Related To:

Electronic Design

Sept. 30, 2025

Piezoelectric-based MEMS have been used for sensors, but they can also function as actuators to perform tasks such as moving air and fluids. The technology also makes it possible to implement a tiny speaker.

In this episode of Inside Electronics, I talked with Mike Housholder, xMEMS Labs’ Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. You can watch the demos in our video “Making MEMS Move Air and Fluids for Fun and Cooling.” And check out the article, “Keeping Chips Cool with PiezoMEMS Modules” to see how xMEMS’ XMC-2400 µCooling module can bring silicon-based, active cooling systems to devices like high-performance, compact M.2 NVMe solid-state drives.

About the Author

William G. Wong

Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.