NiTiNOL, the best known of all the Shape Memory Alloys, has long held the fascination of actuator designers. Many projects have spent many hundreds of millions of dollars trying to bring precision control to its contractions and expansions. Cambridge Mechatronics is one the first companies to successfully apply SMA wire to a high volume consumer precision actuator application.
After two and a half years of research and development, involving our physicists, material scientists, mechanical engineers, semiconductor designers and firmware developers, our SMAA-F technology is now being licensed to the world's leading actuator and mechatronics manufacturers.
They are attracted by its competitiveness in the world's highest volume precision actuator market, mobile camera phones. Not only does SMAA-F promise ever lower costs, it also brings several technical advantages. The SMAA-F actuators are so tiny, half and inch long and the quarter the thickness of a human hair, they are relatively 'mass-less'. This allows not only for continually smaller and lighter phones, but more importantly leaves space for the biggest possible lens, which in turn permits the best possible photography.
