Page 15 - Principles and Applications of NanoMEMS Physics

Chapter 1

NANOELECTROMECHANICAL SYSTEMS

1. 1 NanoMEMS Origins

The field of Nanotechnology, which aims at exploiting advances in the
fabrication and controlled manipulation of nanoscale objects, is attracting
worldwide attention. This attention is predicated upon the fact that obtaining
early supremacy in this field of miniaturization may well be the key to
st
dominating the world economy of the 21 century and beyond. NanoMEMS
exploits the convergence between nanotechnology and
microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) brought about by advances in the
ability to fabricate nanometer-scale electronic and mechanical device
structures. Indeed, the impact of our ability to make and control objects
possessing dimensions down to atomic scales, perhaps first considered by
the late Richard Feynman in his 1959 talk “There is Plenty of Room at the
Bottom” is expected to be astounding [1], [2]. In particular, miniaturization,
he insinuated, has the potential to fuel radical paradigm shifts encompassing
virtually all areas of science and technology, thus giving rise to an unlimited
amount of technical applications. Since high technology fuels the prosperity
of the world’s most developed nations, it is easy to see why the stakes are so
high.
Progress in the field of miniaturization benefited from the advent of the
semiconductor industry in the 1960s, and its race to increase profits through
the downscaling of circuit dimensions which, consequently, increased the
density and the yield of circuits fabricated on a given wafer area. This
density, which derived from progress in photolithographic tools to produce
the ever smaller two-dimensional patterns (device layouts) of an integrated
circuit (IC), has increased since by more than seven orders of magnitude and
has come to be captured by Moore’s law: The number of components per