A Nanoelectromechanical Resonator-Based Flash Style Analog to Digital Converter

Abstract

In this work, the design of a flash-style nanoelectromechanical resonator-based analog to digital converter (ADC) is presented. The operation of the proposed ADC depends on tuning the beam resonance frequency by the sampled voltage, using the electrostatic softening effect. In this paper, experimental results are demonstrated for a 3-bit ADC. The proposed solution reduces design complexity by 20 times and reduces energy consumption by one order of magnitude compared to conventional complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) counterpart. While the measured sampling rate is 8 kS/s, resonators with GHz resonance frequency can increase the sampling rate to MHz and above, making this technology a viable option for medium speed, ultra-low power IoT and sensor applications.