At a glance Full Project Title Nano-Electro-Mechanical Integration And Computation (NEMIAC) Project Objectives The aim of NEMIAC consortium with Swiss, British, Swedish and Italian partners is to demonstrate the viability of nano-electromechanical (NEM) switch technology for ultra-low-power microelectronic applications technology could open up a whole new set of circuit techniques that further reduce power consumption beyond what can be achieved with CMOS. “We use mechanical switches to drive static power consumption down; this has historically been an important driver of development in the industry,” continues Dr Hagleitner.
Long-term performance These NEM switches will of course have to function at the same level as CMOS switches in terms of both efficiency and long-term performance if they are to be widely applied. The air-gap is the key issue with respect to the performance of the switch; researchers are attempting to reduce this down to around 50 nanometres. “To be really competitive against the power of CMOS, you need to scale that further, but then one has to take into account that this is a fairly immature technology,” says Dr Hagleitner. The main goal of the project is to demonstrate the feasibility of the NEM technology, yet Dr Hagleitner and his colleagues are also considering the potential future applications of their research. “Some applications should be enabled by the technology we have developed in this project. There are some specialized applications where the NEM switches have a significant advantage over the CMOS-based logic, even without scaling,” he continues. This will form an important part of the
Fig 3: SEM image of a single-stage NEM switch inverter and an output stage to interface the logic circuit with external measurement equipment.
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future agenda in this area, which will balance both applied and fundamental research into NEM switches. Similar technologies are already being applied commercially, for example in band switches for mobile phones, and Dr Hagleitner says further research could look into commercialising the technology for specialist applications. “There could in future be more research-oriented work that further miniaturises the technology we have now,” he outlines. There are still some technical hurdles to overcome to take the technology into the nanometre domain, which is an important issue in terms of future commercialisation. “The switch needs to be built to be competitive on the broader scale against low-power CMOS technology,” says Dr Hagleitner.
Fig 2: SEM image of a fabricated curved in-plane NEM switch and closeup views of the contact in open and closed position.
Project Funding Funding scheme: STREP Total Cost: €3,958,629.00 EC Contribution: €2,440,000.00 Project Partners IBM Research GmbH (CH), Lancaster University (GB), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (CH), Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan (SE), STMicroelectronics S.r.l. (IT), University of Bristol (GB) Contact Details Project Coordinator, Dr Christoph Hagleitner IBM Research Zurich Research Laboratory Saumerstrasse 4 CH-8803 Ruschlikon, Switzerland T: +41 44 724 8470 E: hle@zurich.ibm.com W: www.nemiac.eu/ W: http://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/ view.php?person=zurich-hle
Dr Christoph Hagleitner
Project Coordinator
Christoph Hagleitner manages the accelerator technologies group at the IBM Research Lab in Ruschlikon, Switzerland. The group focuses on (hardware-based) accelerators for big-data and analytics applications. The research addresses all aspects of accelerator design, ranging from system architecture and compilers to new nano-electro-mechanical (NEM) devices and circuits.
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