MEMS MICRO-MECHANICAL LOGIC GATES FOR MECHANICAL COMPUTINGIN MACHINE ONLY ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

With respect to microsystems, environments such as harshradiation, harsh temperature, or limited space may preclude the useof microelectronics and associated power supply for the purposesof sensor to actuator signal processing. For these situations, thiswork proposes the idea of performing the signal processingcomputation mechanically. To this end, this work presents novelMEMS micro-mechanical logic gates for mechanical computing.Micro-sized mechanical NAND, NOR, inverting logic gates, staticmemory cells, and optically readable outputs are developed,fabricated, and tested. A mechanical logic circuit, with theExclusive-OR (XOR) function, is constructed from threemechanical NAND gates and demonstrated.