Single Active Nanoelectromechanical Tuning Fork Front-End Radio-Frequency Receiver

Nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) offer the potential to revolutionize fundamental methods employed for signal processing in today's telecommunication systems,1-4 owing to their spectral purity and the prospect of integration with existing technology. In this work, we present a novel, front-end receiver topology based on a single-device silicon nanoelectromechanical mixer-filter. The operation is demonstrated by using the signal amplification in a field effect transistor (FET) merged into a tuning fork resonator. The combination of both a transistor and a mechanical element into a hybrid unit enables on-chip functionality and performance in silicon previously unachievable. Signal mixing, filtering and demodulation are experimentally demonstrated at very high frequencies (>100 MHz), maintaining a high quality factor of Q=800, and stable operation at near ambient pressure (0.1 atm) and room temperature (T=300 K). The results show that ultimately miniaturized, silicon NEMS can be utilized to realize multi-band, single-chip receiver systems based on NEMS mixer-filter arrays with reduced system complexity and power consumption.