The Nanomechanics is interested in studying the behavior of advanced material systems at the nanoscale. Particular material systems of interest include polymers and polymer nanocomposites, as well as thin film and piezoelectric materials of interest in MEMS applications.
Nanomechanics is a branch of science studying fundamental mechanical (elastic, thermal and kinetic) properties of physical systems and engineered and biological nanostructures and nanosystems. Nano mechanics, in particular, is the study and characterization of the mechanical behaviour of individual atoms, systems and structures in response to various types of forces and loading conditions.
Nanomechanical Computing:
Nanomechanics is a branch of science studying fundamental mechanical (elastic, thermal and kinetic) properties of physical systems and engineered and biological nanostructures and nanosystems. Nano mechanics, in particular, is the study and characterization of the mechanical behaviour of individual atoms, systems and structures in response to various types of forces and loading conditions.
Nanomechanical Computing:
The impressive trend of packing more transistors continues with advances in foundry technologies. Now at 22 nm node, some of the current processors pack over a billion transistors in a chip. However, three other markers, clock speed, power consumption and performance have flat-lined for almost a decade since 2002-2003. For reference, the original 8086 processor drew about 1.84 W and Pentium-3 1 GHz processor drew 33 W. The CPU power consumption increased by 18x while the CPU frequency improved by 125x. However, this expanded version of Moore’s law collapsed in mid 2000’s, when power consumption and clock speed improvements stopped. Even with other advances such as new cache technology and invention of out-of-order execution, improvement in processor efficiency came to a standing halt.
For instance, at 90 nm node, the transistor gates became too thin to prevent current from leaking into the substrate. Subsequent advances included innovations such as strained silicon, high-k dielectrics and FinFET. Currently, the 22nm node uses a three-dimensional transistor technology to continue with the thinning gap between the channel and the gate. However, all these innovations still have not managed to help continue the impressive trend of the expanded version of Moore’s law. For example, from 2007 to 2011, maximum CPU clock speed rose from 2.93GHz to 3.9GHz, an increase of 33%. From 1994 to 1998, CPU clock speeds rose by 300%. This problem has been acknowledged for almost two decades. In a sense, the community (led by Intel and AMD) has conceded defeat by switching to multi-core approaches, though the demonstrated benefits tantamount to incremental advances in architecture, compared to the expectations according to Moore’s law.