A Micro-Resonator Based Digital to Analog Converter for Ultralow Power Applications

This paper presents a micro-resonator based digital to analog converter (DAC) for the internet of things (IoT) and low power applications. The device consists of a clamped-clamped micro-resonator with multiple electrodes. To enable the operation as a DAC, the air-gap between each partial electrode and the beam is varied based on the weight of input bits, so the beam's resonance frequency and the output amplitude are decided by digital inputs. The tested DAC consumes 7 pJ/conversion step with a sampling rate of 64 S/s. We show that a sampling rate of 0.1 MS/s and energy/conversion of 2.7 fJ can be achieved by moderate device scaling.