Scaling Limits of Electrostatic Nanorelays

A model to explore the scaling limits of electrostatically actuated nanorelays is presented, which shows that adhesion in a nanorelay's contact interface limits its performance with respect to operating voltage, contact resistance, and switching energy. For logic applications, we show that an ultimately scaled relay can be more efficient than conventional metal-oxide-semiconductor devices if (1) it is designed with very high contact resistances, leading to ≈ 1-MHz operation due to large RC delays, or (2) its actuation area is extremely large compared with its contacting area, leading to very low voltage operation, which reduces overall CV2losses. We propose new relay scaling relations that account for the scaling of contact interfaces.