xMEMS is a company that so far is best known for its MEMS—or microelectromechanical systems—based speaker drivers, but since around the middle of last year, the company has also developed a range of MEMS based cooling solutions. The xMEMS µCooling is competing with a range of new cooling solutions from several new companies and, although their current solution is unlikely to find its way into laptops today, the company has tested to cool hotter running chips using multiple MEMS µCooling modules to great success. The XMC-2400—also known as Sequoia—is the first product and it has an airflow of up to 35 cubic centimeters per second, which isn't a huge amount, but the cooler is said to be inaudible during operation and it also has the added benefit of being waterproof and the entire MEMS cooling module can be soldered in place. At an estimated power consumption of a mere 30 mW, it's also a very power efficient cooling solution. xMEMS had some demos at its booth, of which the one pictured below shows the XMC-2400 blowing or sucking air, with a small fan-wheel spinning to show the movement of the air. Another showcased the static pressure, pushing air through tubing and into a beaker filled with water. Potential applications include removing hot air from phones, although we may see some smaller SoCs getting cooled too.On the speaker driver side, a lot of things have happened and xMEMS had two interesting products on display at CES this year. First up is a prototype 2-way hybrid driver set of headphones using a dynamic driver paired with the xMEMS Cowell, which is a MEMS tweeter that handles 4 kHz and higher. The addition of the tweeter to any pair of typical headphones is also meant to improve spatial imaging, with the company claiming the tweeter improves not only the ability of the listener to locate sounds by up to 30 percent over traditional headphone designs, but also that the listener would do so 15 percent faster. This sounds like something that might be interesting in a gaming headset and we may see this being adopted by the likes of Turtle Beach if things go well. Regardless, it appears as if the Cowell tweeter should be quite easy for headphone manufacturers to add to their products, based on the mockups on display.Next up is a product called Sycamore, which is a near-field MEMS speaker that can be used in anything from earphones, to smart glasses and smartwatches according to the company. The idea here is that you end up with a speaker that takes up very little space, while still providing decent audio quality, unlike something like a piezo-electric tweeter which is often used when space is of the essence. xMEMS claims their Sycamore speakers are only a third of the thickness of a traditional speaker, at only 1 mm thick and it weighs a mere 150 milligrams. As with their other products, it too has the benefit of being waterproof and dust resistant with an IP58 rating, again making it ideal for portable electronics. There was a mockup to show it could be integrated into a smartwatch housing and although due to the lack of actual smartphone electronics, a wire was running from the speaker to be able to demo the audio quality.Also on display were some of xMEMS current speaker drivers, which come in a wide range for different applications. To date, Creative seems to be the biggest customer, at least when it comes to TWS earbuds, but it's likely that we'll see more companies adopting xMEMS speaker drivers in the future.