Computing with Liquid-State Nanomechanical Oscillator Networks

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Our research program explores the use of nanoscale mechanical elements to replace electronic transistors as the elemental building block of advanced computing devices. It is well-known that it is increasingly difficult and expensive to reduce the dimensions of electronic transistors to create better computing applications, due to fundamental physical limitations in their fabrication process. Instead, we look for inspiration in extraordinarily powerful and energy-efficient computing systems such as the human brain, to propose a computing machine based on mechanical units interconnected in a complex network. Mechanical units are chosen because they can be fabricated at small dimensions with unique capabilities (high speed, low energy consumption, non-linear behavior). These units are organized in a network, like neurons in the brain, because this type of organization can lead to much more interesting computing devices with characteristics typical of living organisms (massive parallelism, robustness, adaptability). We suggest, in particular, the novel use of very small oscillating droplets of liquid metal (diameters down to 100 nm) as the mechanical units for our demonstrators. These nano-droplets are reasonably simple to fabricate and, being liquid, have very interesting properties for our purpose. Thousands of droplets will be assembled in networks to study the emergence of computing capabilities. It is expected that these complex mechanisms will perform far better than standard electronic computers on difficult and important problems, such as the detection of patterns in sounds or in images.