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Somulu Seminar Report On Nems
Somulu Seminar Report On Nems
ABSTRACT
device designs have been proposed, some have been developed, and
fewer have reached commercialization.
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. What is an Electro-Mechanical System?
3. What is a Micro Electro-Mechanical System?
4. The First MEMS Device
5. The benefits of Nano-machines
6. The benefits of Nano-machines
7. How to make NEMS
a. Fabrication
b. Deposition Processes
c. Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD)
d. Epitaxy
e. Lithography
f. Alignment
g. Exposure
h. Etching
8. Challenges for NEMS
9. Advantages
10. Applications of NEMS
11. Drawbacks
12. Future outlook
13. Conclusion
14. References
Introduction
beam away from the fixed. Conversely, by applying opposite polarity the
parts are attracted. In this manner the comb drive can be moved "in" or
"out" and either DC or AC voltages can be applied. The magnitude of
electrostatic force is multiplied by the voltage or more commonly the
surface area and number of teeth. Commercial comb drives have several
thousand teeth, each tooth approximately 10 micro meters long. Drive
voltages are CMOS levels.
The linear push / pull motion of a comb drive can be converted into
rotational motion by coupling the drive to push rod and pinion on a wheel.
In this manner the comb drive can rotate the wheel in the same way a
steam engine functions!
The small effective mass of the vibrating part of the device - or the
small moment of inertia for torsional devices - has another important
consequence. It gives NEMS an astoundingly high sensitivity to additional
masses - clearly a valuable attribute for a wide range of sensing
applications. Recent work by Kamil Ekinci at Caltech supports the
prediction that the most sensitive devices we can currently fabricate are
measurably affected by small numbers of atoms being adsorbed on the
surface of the device. Meanwhile, the small size of NEMS also implies that
they have a highly localized spatial response. Moreover, the geometry of
a NEMS device can be tailored so that the vibrating element reacts only to
external forces in a specific direction. This flexibility is extremely useful
for designing new types of scanning probe microscopes.
NEMS devices are extremely small - for example, NEMS has made
possible electrically-driven motors smaller than the diameter of a human
hair (right), but NEMS technology is not primarily about size. NEMS is
also not about making things out of silicon, even though silicon possesses
excellent materials properties, which make it an attractive choice for
many high-performance mechanical applications; for example, the
strength-to-weight ratio for silicon is higher than many other engineering
Over the past six years, new techniques have been developed for
patterning freely suspended 3-D semiconductor structures. These
techniques apply to bulk silicon, epitaxial silicon and silicon-on-insulator
hetero structures, as well as to systems based on gallium arsenide and
indium arsenide.
Fabrication
There are three basic building blocks in NEMS technology, which are
the ability to deposit thin films of material on a substrate, to apply a
Dept of Electronics & Compute Science VNIT
Seminar Report - 15 - NEMS
Deposition Processes
CVD processes are ideal to use when you want a thin film with good
step coverage. A variety of materials can be deposited with this
technology. The quality of the material varies from process to process,
however a good rule of thumb is that higher process temperature yields a
material with higher quality and less defects.
Epitaxy
Lithography
Pattern Transfer
Figure 4
a) Pattern definition in positive resist, b) Pattern definition in negative
resist.
Alignment
Exposure
For example a highly reflective layer under the photo resist may result in
the material experiencing a higher dose than if the underlying layer is
absorptive, as the photo resist is exposed both by the incident radiation
as well as the reflected radiation. The dose will also vary with resist
thickness.
Etching
Wet Etching
Dry Etching
NEMS are clearly very small devices that can deflect or vibrate
within an even smaller range during operation. For example, the
deflection of a doubly clamped beam varies linearly with an applied force
only if it is displaced by an amount that typically corresponds to a few per
cent of its thickness. For a beam 10 nm in diameter, this translates to
displacements that are only a fraction of a nano-meter. Building
transducers that are sensitive enough to allow information to be
transferred accurately at this scale requires reading out positions with a
far greater precision. A further difficulty is that the natural frequency of
this motion increases with decreasing size. So the ideal NEMS transducer
must ultimately be capable of resolving displacements in the 10-15-10-12
m range and be able to do so up to frequencies of a few giga hertz. These
two requirements are truly daunting, and much more challenging than
those faced by the MEMS community so far.
Advantages
Cost effectiveness
System Integration
High Precision
Small size
Applications of NEMS
One would assume then that the detection of individual atoms using
MRI is only a distant dream. However, in 1991 John Sidles of the
University of Washington at Seattle proposed that mechanical detection
methods could lead to nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry that
would be sensitive to the spin of a single proton. Achieving this degree of
sensitivity would be a truly revolutionary advance, allowing, for example,
individual bimolecules to be imaged with atomic-scale resolution in three
dimensions.
With the advent of NEMS, several groups are investigating fast logic
gates, switches and even computers that are entirely mechanical. The
idea is not new. Charles Babbage designed the first mechanical computer
in the 1820s, which is viewed as the forerunner to the modern computer.
His ideas were abandoned in the 1960s when the speed of nanosecond
electronic logic gates and integrated circuits vastly outperformed moving
elements. But now that NEMS can move on timescales of a nanosecond or
less, the established dogma of the digital electronic age needs careful re-
examination.
Biotechnology
Accelerometers
Nano nozzles
NEMS in Wireless
Drawbacks
Limited Options
Packaging
Future outlook
physics will undoubtedly emerge from this new field, including single-spin
magnetic resonance and phonon counting using mechanical devices.
But there remains a gap between today's NEMS devices that are
sculpted from bulk materials and those that will ultimately be built atom
by atom. In the future, complex molecular-scale mechanical devices will
be mass-produced by placing millions of atoms with exquisite precision or
by some form of controlled self-assembly. This will be true
nanotechnology. Nature has already mastered such remarkable feats of
atomic assembly, forming molecular motors and machinery that can
transport biochemical within cells or move entire cells.
as the lattices move in and out of registry. The further implications of the
mechanical and electrical properties of contacting lattices in NEMS devices
will be explored, including applications in actuators, encoders and
oscillators.
Conclusion
References
Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, ed., The MEMS Handbook, CRC Press 2001, ISBN
0-8493-0077-0
http://www.foresight.org
http://www.physicsweb.org
http://www.nemsnet.org
http://www.menet.umn.edu
http://www.nemsrus.com
http://www.sandia.gov
http://www.elearning.stut.edu
http://www.allaboutnems.com
http://www.embedded.com
http://www.ee.ttu.edu/nems
http://www.nems-exchange.org
http://www.optics.caltech.edu
http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu