Non-Volatile Nano-Electro-Mechanical Switches and Hybrid Circuits in a 16 nm CMOS Back-End-of-Line Process

Abstract

Reprogrammable non-volatile (NV) vertically-oriented nano-electro-mechanical (NEM) switches with a compact footprint are successfully implemented using multiple back-end-of-line (BEOL) interconnect layers of a standard 16-nm CMOS process technology, with no additional lithography steps. A compact decoder circuit comprising an array of these reconfigurable interconnects is successfully demonstrated. As the minimum metal pitch decreases with each new manufacturing process generation, hybrid CMOS+NEM technology becomes increasingly attractive for ultra-low-power reconfigurable computing applications.