Nanoelectromechanical Quantum Circuits and Systems
This paper introduces the novel field of nanoelectromechanical quantum circuits and systems. The field derives from exploiting progress in techniques for fabricating, down to nanometer-length scales, freestanding device structures that incorporate mechanical motion and that may be designed to perform a variety of functions, such as optical, electrical, and, in particular, mechanical and mixed domain. The ability to create these nanomechanical structures, in turn, brings within our reach a tremendous possibility for both creating superior implementations of conventional circuits and systems, as well as entirely new ones. Since novel quantum mechanical effects, for instance, quantized heat flow, manifestation of charge discreteness, and the quantum electrodynamical Casimir effect, become operative in this regime, exciting new paradigms for circuit modeling and design must be invoked in order to fully exploit the potential of this technology in sensing, computation, and signal processing applications.
Expert Analysis
We are living in exciting times. On the one hand, the miniaturization program envisioned by Feynman in 1959 is on the verge of reaching, perhaps in the early decades of this new century, its ultimate goal, namely, the realization of atom-level information storage, computing, signal processing, and mechanical functions. On the other hand, the emergence of new materials, concepts, and techniques, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), photonic bandgap crystals, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), respectively, has opened up new possibilities, now only limited by our imagination, to implement a new "electronics" technology with attributes that are far superior to everything known to date. With the simultaneous convergence and exploitability, at such small-length scales (e.g., down to a few nanometers), of various types of physical properties and effects, for instance, electronic, mechanical, optical, and magnetic and quantum effects, the nature of the concomitant new universe of devices and circuits that will fuel this new electronics will clearly be vast, yet it is at present mostly unknown.
Given the huge investments in the established silicon fabrication infrastructure, efforts are currently being aimed at capturing these new opportunities, while inducing a minimum of process disruption, and exploiting the very fine-line lithography and multilevel metallization germane to advanced integrated circuit processes. The logical culmination of continued miniaturization of conventional devices will be the demise of Moore's Law and the ushering of the new "electronics" mentioned above, which will invoke the conception and utilization of totally new device - circuit paradigms. In this context, the emphasis of the nanoelectromechanical quantum circuits and systems (NEMX) vision exposed here is on "new electronics." Indeed, while nanoelectromechanical fabrication technology may well open the way for breakthroughs in the areas of environmental sensing, detection, and transduction of physical quantities, such as force, heat, and biomolecules, or even improve, in an evolutionary fashion, the performance of current technology, our distinct aim here is to present emerging paradigms to produce the hardware that will be at the core of the computers (e.g., mainframes, personal computers, laptops, PDAs, etc.) and wireless communications appliances (e.g., cell phones, satellites, etc.) of the future.
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