Recent Progress in FSMA Microactuator Developments
The giant magneto-strain effect is particularly attractive for actuator applications in micro- and nanometer dimensions as it enables contact-less control of large deformations, which can hardly be achieved by other actuation principles in small space. Two different approaches are being pursued to develop ferromagnetic shape memory (FSMA) microactuators based on the magnetically induced reorientation of martensite variants: (1) the fabrication of free-standing epitaxial Ni-Mn-Ga thin film actuators in a bottom-up manner by magnetron sputtering, substrate release and integration technologies and (2) the top-down approach of thickness reduction of bulk Ni-Mn-Ga single crystals to foil specime…
Chip-to-chip plasmonic interconnects and the activities of EU project NAVOLCHI
In this paper, the chip-to-chip interconnection architecture adopted by the EU-project NAVOLCHI are discussed. The plasmonic physical layer consisting of a plasmonic nanoscale laser, a modulator, an amplifier and a detector is introduced. Current statuses of the plasmonic devices are reviewed.