Sacha: The stanford carbon nanotube controlled handshaking robot

Abstract

Low-power applications, such as sensing, are becoming increasingly important and demanding in terms of minimizing energy consumption, driving the search for new and innovative interface architectures and technologies. Carbon Nanotube FETs (CNFETs) are excellent candidates for further energy reduction, as CNFET-based digital circuits are projected to potentially achieve an order of magnitude improvement in energy-delay product at highly scaled technology nodes. This paper presents an overview of the first demonstration of a complete sub-system, a sensor interface circuit, implemented entirely using CNFETs. The demonstrated sub-system is an all-digital capacitive sensor to digital converter. The CNFET sensor interface is demonstrated by using the CNFET circuitry to interface with a sensor used to control a handshaking robot.