Micro (and Nano) Mechanical Signal Processors

Assistant Professor-Electrical and Computer Engineering; Cornell University
With quality factors (Q) often-exceeding 10,000, vibrating micromechanical resonators have emerged as leading candidates for on-chip versions of high-Q resonators used in wireless communications systems. However, as in the case for transistors, extending the frequency of MEMS resonators generally entails scaling of resonator dimensions. Unfortunately, smaller size often coincides with lower-power handling capability and increased motional impedance. In this talk, I will introduce novel transduction techniques which can improve the motional impedance of MEMS resonators by 1000X over traditional 'air-gap' transduced resonators, present latest results on narrow-bandwidth parametric filters for frequency-agile radio receivers, and discuss performance scaling of NEMS resonators to X-band frequencies.
Sunil Bhave received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998 and 2004 respectively, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. In October 2004, he joined the faculty of Cornell University, where he is presently an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests focus on resonators for radio, microwave and photonic front-ends, micro-mechanical computation, accelerometers and gyroscopes, mechanically locked loops, and hybrid NEMS-CMOS technologies. Professor Bhave received the NSF Early CAREER Development Award and the Cornell IEEE Chapter Professor of the Year Award in 2007, and the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2008.