[AlphaAlien]

The gears in many of todays electronic devices (think of CD-ROM's and DVD players), use very noisy, fairly ineffective motors, which are inaccurate at slow speeds. Elliptec out of Dortmund, Germany, also a spinoff from Siemens, has developed a simple, gearless, piezoelectric motor.This piezoelectric motor uses the electrically induced vibration of special ceramic materials to spin a wheel or move a rod. Earlier piezoelectric motors were impractical due to there high cost, normally in the hundreds of dollars; Elliptec's design has the possibility to reach market at close to $1 per motor, due mainly to the simpler three-part design and cheap materials. This motor (roughly the size of a penny) is 1/12 the weight of a standard electromagnetic motor, is very quiet, and can run at a large variety of speeds with much higher accuracy than today's motors. The motors are already shipping and will most likely first come to market inside of robotic toys to produce better limb and eye movements.