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Design and Modeling Environment for Nano-Electro-Mechanical Switch (NEMS) Digital Systems

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, EECS - Computer Engineering.
In this thesis, we study models for an innovative type of Nano-Electro-Mechanical Switch (NEMS) at the physical, logical and circuit level. NEMS are switching devices, which have virtually zero leakage current, 1-3 V operation voltage, 1-10 ns switching time, and small footprint. NEMS switches can be easily hybridized with CMOS at the metallization or device levels to manage leakage current and power. Our fabricated NEMS switches enable the implementation of a digital switching function using four times fewer switches than traditional approaches. In particular, the design of basic two-input logic gates (AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, XNOR, NOT and BUF) can be implemented on a single NEMS switch. We design a compact and ultra-low power NEMS FPGA using these devices. The FPGA implementation uses a four-input CLB, which requires only eight NEMS switches and at most two mechanical delays per computation. In contrast, CMOS CLBs require over 150 traditional switches. By reducing the number of devices, our approach improves yield, reproducibility, speed, and power and simplifies the implementation. To accurately evaluate the performance of NEMS digital systems, we derive a SPICE circuit simulation model (Macromodel) that allows the evaluation of the NEMS based systems using fast circuit simulation techniques with the same accuracy of a slow multi-physics 3D Finite Element Analysis (FEA) model. The 3D FEA model is constructed to capture the multi-physics phenomena of the switches using the FEA simulation tool (COMSOL Multi-physics). The 3D FEA model is calibrated using the fabricated device measurements. This ensures that the 3D FEA physical device model produces the results that are similar to the results obtained from the fabricated device measurements. Using the 3D FEA physical model, we present a procedure to extract mechanical parameters which are used in developing the mechanical lumped model. The NEMS Macromodel is integrated into a circuit simulator enabling the evaluation of NEMS devices in an electrical design environment. The accuracy of the NEMS Macromodel is verified using the device properties derived from the 3D FEA models and measured from the fabricated devices. Using the circuit simulator, we measure the power dissipation of NEMS designs and compare them to the CMOS digital designs. Our experiment shows three to four times of magnitude improvement in power reduction for the NEMS technology over CMOS. This technology could be an alternative technology in implementing portable battery-power systems that are limited by the battery life and the ambient environments.
Daniel Saab (Committee Chair)
Marc Buchner (Committee Member)
Francis Merat (Committee Member)
Christos Papachristou (Committee Member)
Massood Tabib-Azar (Committee Member)
117 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Han, S. (2013). Design and Modeling Environment for Nano-Electro-Mechanical Switch (NEMS) Digital Systems [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1354568246

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Han, Sijing. Design and Modeling Environment for Nano-Electro-Mechanical Switch (NEMS) Digital Systems. 2013. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1354568246.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Han, Sijing. "Design and Modeling Environment for Nano-Electro-Mechanical Switch (NEMS) Digital Systems." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1354568246

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)