Additively manufacturable micro-mechanical logic gates

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08678-0

by bobajeff • 7 years ago

120 49 7 years ago

A key benefit of the proposed approach is that such systems can be additively fabricated as embedded parts of microarchitected metamaterials that are capable of interacting mechanically with their surrounding environment while processing and storing digital data internally without requiring electric power.

The Diamond Age is upon us.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

scifi reference ?

ps: indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

taneq• 7 years ago

My first thought too. Aw yeah, rod logic!

nimish• 7 years ago

NEM relays have these beat in size, at least: https://nems.stanford.edu/nem-relays

azernik• 7 years ago

Those are electromechanical - they use mechanical changes to open and close electrical pathways. These are purely mechanical.

tndl• 7 years ago

3D printed mechanical logic gates 100um in size, compute speeds in Mhz, and power consumption that approaches 0. Pretty cool.

genericone• 7 years ago

0 consumption at idle. Have to put in some good old fashioned Work=Force*Distance when you perform an operation though.

Also, how many toggles can each gate go through before material fatigue causes the logic to get stuck? Some interesting questions which would need answering before it can be utilized by any industry.

6nf4• 7 years ago

Flexures can last forever if you stay within the plastic deformation range for that material. These can fail from other things though, e.g. mechanical shock, thermal extremes, stuff like that.

baybal2• 7 years ago

0 consumption at idle.

Like as if transistors can't pull that out. Just active logic families all went extinct long long time ago because passive logic (powered at idle) was so much easier to design.

petra• 7 years ago

A typical circuit for this is a micro-controller.

We already have micro-controller designs with zero leakage current at standby(with fast wakeup), which is practically zero-leakage:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6690972

I wonder why aren't they being commercialized though.

bitwize2• 7 years ago

This is Young Lady's Illustrated Primer stuff. The future just became a slightly cooler place to be. I am so stoked.

FullyFunctional• 7 years ago

Really interesting. Alas, the "Supplementary Movie 1" appears corrupted for me (tried two devices, two networks).

potiuper• 7 years ago

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1368063

soln: save movie file & open using video player

bobajeff• 7 years ago

I've had luck playing it with VLC.

Also, for anyone else having issues playing it, it's posted on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUtAdJKKDF0

dfox• 7 years ago

Exactly why is it important that this particular structure can be additively manufactured? Typical additive processes can create essentially anything, exactly because there are no limitations steming from tooling geometry and workholding that are typical for traditional subtractive machining.

samplatt• 7 years ago

Speaking as Stephenson/Doctorow fan as well as a member of ever-growing sector of the population that have had their technological paranoia continually proven right for the last fifteen years, improvements in additive manufacturing of miniaturised computation technology assists in keeping a small section of power with the larger population, rather than being forced to rely on hyperlarge gated conglomerates to parcel out materials to us.

blotter_paper2• 7 years ago

I don't know why this is being down-voted. Anyone care to elaborate? If we don't want to rely on centralised manufacturing we need to be able to make computers in the privacy of our own homes. Otherwise, whoever controls the entities that manufacture our computers can put in backdoors. The government has straight-up said that they want backdoors into all encryption. Worrying about this, and making progress towards decentralised manufacture, doesn't seem crazy to me.

jjoonathan• 7 years ago

Sure, anything -- so long as it doesn't have geometric extent, fit, finish, accuracy, internal strain, material composition, or volume economic requirements within a couple orders of magnitude of the competing traditional processes.

In other words, it's nice to know that they were able to achieve these results on a 3D printer rather than a multimillion dollar MEMS facility.

paulsutter• 7 years ago

Because it would be great to be able to 3d print complete working systems including both structure and electronics.

Current 3d processes really can’t do that. Yet.

unwind• 7 years ago

But there are no electrons!

I don't think MEMS is an awesome term for mainstream usage ...

How about "mechonics"? Or "springonics"? Maybe "flexonics"? :)

PaulHoule• 7 years ago

These look a lot like the system proposed by Drexler back in the 80's!

abecedarius• 7 years ago

More like Merkle's buckled-spring logic, at first glance. Merkle was building on Drexler, though.

galaxyLogic• 7 years ago

How do you program it? Would the programs have to be mechanically constructed as well?

yetihehe2• 7 years ago

Like all logic chips today, with a standalone programmer. You make program on your desk computer then send it to chip. Electronic-mechanical converter would setup your device.

Without computer you could do it old-way with a panel of switchable bits and clock signal. You enter required bits with user-switchable levers, then switch clock lever up and down, then enter another machine-word. Or make your program on punch cards.

3chelon2• 7 years ago

I'd have thought a mask ROM would be incredibly easy to build. And the whole system would be nonvolatile anyway, so storage of mutable data would be straightforward.

Ultimately the code would compile down to binary; getting it into the machine is just like any other interface.

bitwize2• 7 years ago

Apparently it runs fast enough to be programmed interactively. Keyboard input via mechanical linkages is a solved problem: consider the humble typewriter. The Selectric typewriter even had macroscopic digital mechanical "circuitry"; each keypress moved a lever with lugs that encoded a binary code specifying coordinates for where on the typeball the character was located, and special linkages called whiffletrees converted the digital code into analog rotations for the typeball mechanism in the manner of an R-2R ladder or similar in the electronic realm.

The idea is that the CPU and peripherals would communicate via mechanical linkage (say, levers moved, or not moved, according to whether the signal is "high" or "low") rather than electronic voltage levels on a wire. For some peripherals, electromechanical adapters could be built that use relays to convert electronic signals to mechanical ones and back, allowing you to theoretically even plug in standard PC keyboards and displays into such a mechanical computer.

travisoneill1• 7 years ago

As a result, such devices generate no electromagnetic signature and are highly insensitive to radiation damage.

Sounds like this would be ideal for use in spacecraft.

blotter_paper2• 7 years ago

And evading TEMPEST attacks.

3chelon2• 7 years ago

Buy one now. After the Solar Flare Apocalypse, those of us rocking mechanical computers will be control the world!

dmolony• 7 years ago

I hope they build a Difference Engine or Analytical Engine as a proof of concept.

kwhitefoot• 7 years ago

Sounds like Ken Macleod's babbages. See The Cassini Division, etc.

segfaultbuserr3• 7 years ago

Does anyone on HN can explain this question to me: is there a real obstacle that prevents one to build a general-purpose digital computer using pure macroscopic mechanical components? Historically, we had several types of special-purpose mechanical computers, but a general-purpose mechanical computer was never built.

Was it because the mechanical parts are too prohibitively rigid/inflexible/heavy/expensive for a computer? Or, a real barrier for mechanical computers doesn't really exist, and we didn't have it simply because it was not economically worthwhile to build one after electronic computers were feasible?

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

Not an expert, but two obvious issues come to mind:

1) Energy loss due to friction & constantly working against inertia (regular and rotational).

2) I don't think you could get anywhere close to even a kilohertz without the whole contraption shaking itself apart. When we say a CPU has a clock of 1GHz, this literally means some components are being activated and deactivated a billion times a second.

Both problems seem to be correlated with size. That is, the smaller it gets, the faster a mechanism can run.

xg15• 7 years ago

Not sure if possible, but I've found the idea of building a general-purpose fluidics machine fascinating. This might solve the problem in (1).

I do agree with (2) though - I think anything macroscale would simple be orders of magnitude slower than what we can archieve at microscale. I don't know if there is any way out of this.

yetihehe2• 7 years ago

First computers used relays, becase they were already faster and cheaper than purely mechanical computer. Then came lamps which were even faster. Nowadays mechanical computers are just uneconomical curiosity, but thanks to miniturisation they look like they might be economical for several VERY special purposes where silicon just doesn't work.

Was it because the mechanical parts are too prohibitively rigid/inflexible/heavy/expensive for a computer?

Yes, and it was all those reasons at once. Electrical/electronical computers were better at every metric simultaneously.

adrianN2• 7 years ago

You might want to read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine There is good reason to believe that it can actually be built, and a simpler design that is not general-purpose is exhibited in the Science Museum in London.

segfaultbuserr3• 7 years ago

Thanks, I confused Differential Engine and Analytical Engine, and believed the latter was a more much powerful version, but still not general-purpose. But apparently Analytical Engine is Turing-complete.

pjc50• 7 years ago

You should have a look at the old IBM Hollerith machines. Although I think they count as electro-mechanical.

a real barrier for mechanical computers doesn't really exist, and we didn't have it simply because it was not economically worthwhile to build one after electronic computers were feasible

Bit of both: electronics is easier to miniturise, and as a result of that it's easier to manufacture, easier to maintain, lighter, and consumes less power.

Speed of operation of a mechanical computer is limited by the acceleration of the parts.

_Microft• 7 years ago

Mechanical circuits could be a low performance replacement for electronics in environments where the latter fail, e.g. because of high temperatures or radiation.

I think I remember something about an idea for a mechanical communications system for a Venus lander that worked by wheels that increased or decreased radar reflections so data could be read from orbit by bouncing a radar signal off it.

Maybe combine stuff like this?

Edit: adding link: https://www.theengineer.co.uk/mechanical-rover-explore-venus... .

Additively manufacturable micro-mechanical logic gates

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