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Graphene nanotech switches have the capability of vastly shrinking many electronic devices and could vastly expand the capability of MEMS. This could lead to major changes in the economics of the semi/nanotech industry and create a much larger market than we currently have. The ability of researchers to constantly advance numerous technologies at an ever accelerating rate is literally changing the economics of the entire world and even our social and business structures. This is but one more advance that create whole new markets that are yet to be explored and exploited. As the flood of new technologies the feed a cycle that is ever broader, deeper and faster, the economic and social rules we have will have to either change or break, as we see at an ever accelerating rate I call the "Great Acceleration". This is not any one or even family of technologies, but a vast wave of technologies and platforms that make everything obsolete at an ever increasing rate. This will require new educational, social and economic models if we are not to suffer very horrible side effects as we as a society fail to come up with social, economic and educational methods to deal with it. Thoughts, comments and observations solicited and wanted on these issues.
Two of the problems with NEMS/MEMS nano-switches have been the relatively high voltages necessary for reliable pull-in and pull-out, and the low switching speed in comparison to CMOS switches.
Two of the problems with NEMS/MEMS nano-switches have been the relatively high voltages necessary for reliable pull-in and pull-out, and the low switching speed in comparison to CMOS switches.
In imec also research has been done on switches in the interconnect layer but research was stopped due to lack of interest from industry. I really liked it, I thought they would be perfect for doing the interconnect and maybe even the LUTs of FPGAs. They should leak less than SRAM based FPGA and also be smaller.
