Relays do not leak - CMOS does

This paper describes the micro-architectural and circuit design techniques for building complex VLSI circuits with microelectromechanical (MEM) relays and presents experimental results to demonstrate the viability of this technology. By tailoring the circuits and micro-architecture to the relay device characteristics, the performance of the relay-based multiplier is improved by an order of magnitude over any known static CMOS style implementation, and by ∼4x over CMOS pass-gate equivalent implementations. A 16-bit relay multiplier is shown to offer ∼10x lower energy per operation at sub-10 MOPS throughputs when compared to an optimized CMOS multiplier at an equivalent 90 nm technology node. The functionality of the primary multiplier building block, a full (7:3) compressor built with 46 scaled MEM-relays, which is the largest working MEMrelay circuit reported to date, is also demonstrated.