NTT Research and Development 2011 Review of Activities

Overview

We developed a novel digital processing method that involves vibrating a tiny doubly clumped beam oscillator fabricated with micromachine^*1 technology. This method allows not only the fundamental logic operations of AND, OR, and XOR, but also multiple operations in parallel. To our knowledge, this is the first proposal for constructing a logic circuit from a single electromechanical device. The technique is potentially the key to constructing nanomachine computers that may lead to highly energy efficient and robust signal processing systems.

Features

• The active element is a 250 µm-long, 85 µm-wide, and 1.4 µm-thick beam oscillator.
• The binary information is encoded as an oscillation with an amplitude of 10^-8 m.
• Multiple channels of binary information are encoded as the oscillations at different frequencies.
• The function of parametric frequency conversion^*2 can mix the input binary channels to construct all the primary logic gates.
• The multiple and parallel logic operations with multiple inputs and outputs are also possible.

Application scenarios

• Highly energy-efficient and robust computer systems
• Ubiquitous systems requiring low power consumption
• Integration with highly sensitive MEMS sensors and optical devices

• *1 Micromachine (MEMS): Technologies to integrate micron-size mechanical devices on a chip using semiconductor microfabrication methods.
• *2 Parametric frequency conversion: A technique to generate difference or sum frequencies by mixing two oscillations with different frequencies.