Wafer Power: Building Circuits

In one of the world's cleanest environments -- scientists and engineers at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass. turn sand into tomorrow's semiconductors.
It's an amazing process that takes silicon crystals, called boules, slices them into thin wafers and then builds millions of circuits -- that can run everything from computers to cell phones.

Engineer Jeremy Muldavin and his team also create even smaller components on these wafers -- called microelectromechanical systems or MEMS. MEMS move and they can sense things. So if semiconductors are the brains in a system - then MEMS are the hands and the eyes.