Engineering Commons^™

Nanothermomechanical Logic Gates For Thermal Computing, Ahmed Hamed

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Limited performance and reliability of electronic devices at extreme temperatures, intensive electromagnetic fields, and radiation found in space exploration missions (i.e., Venus & Jupiter planetary exploration, and heliophysics missions) and earth-based applications require the development of alternative computing technologies. Thermal computing, data processing based on heat instead of electricity, is proposed as a practical alternative and opens a new scientific area at the interface between thermal and computational sciences.

We successfully developed thermal AND, OR and NOT logic gates, achieved through the coupling between near-field thermal radiation and MEMS thermal actuation. In the process, we developed two novel non-linear thermal …