Engineers at Yale develop new type of mechanical memory

o create the new memory switch, the team began with an ordinary silicon-on-insulator wafer which they fashioned into an oval waveguide to serve as an optical cavity. They then shaved away some of the wafer beneath the waveguide to create a sort of a tiny bridge made of silicon over the cavity. But because of the pressure from both ends introduced by the process that applied the silicon to thewafer originally, the bridge or strip of material buckled upwards slightly, like a toothpick squeezed slightly between the fingers. They then fired a laser into the cavity below the wave guide which caused the silicon strip to oscillate - buckling down, then back up, and so on as long as the laser was applied. When the laser was turned off, the silicon strip became stranded in either the buckled up or buckled down state, the essence of a switch (1 for up 0 for down).

Unfortunately, at this point, the up or down state could not be accurately predicted, thus, it wouldn’t be useful for much of anything. To make the switch come to rest in a predetermined up or down state, the researchers applied a laser with a lower frequency that dampened the effects of the oscillations to the point where its stopping point could be controlled by modifying the frequency applied.

Reading the up buckled or down buckled state is done by shining a low energylaser (low enough so it won’t cause the strip to change positions) into the cavity and measuring its refractive index.

The end result is a switch that can be controlled at room temperature and that will hold its position without the need for any electricity at all. The only real downside to it thus far, is that it takes far more energy to make the switch move than does conventional non-mechanical memory switches, which would make a device using it much more expensive to run. Still, Tang suggests the switch could be used in devices that don’t need to switch very often, such as an optical router, or where electromagnetic interference causes problems for devices with conventional memory.

It also seems conceivable that such a switch might one day become more commercially viable if a way could be found to reduce the power needed to create the oscillations, which could mean computers, phones, etc. that could hold onto their memory indefinitely without the need for batteries or current.

More information: Dynamic manipulation of nanomechanical resonators in the high-amplitude regime and non-volatile mechanical memory operation, Nature Nanotechnology (2011) doi:10.1038/nnano.2011.180

Preprint is available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4681