Masakazu Aono - Atomic Switch: From Invention to Practical Use and Future Prospects

Advances in Atom and Single Molecule Machines is the first comprehensive series of books dealing specifically with single atom and molecule machines. Derived from a number of long-term European Commission Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) projects including AtMol, Elfos, Focus, Diamant, Artist, PAMS and MEMO, volumes in this series comprise topical reviews, lecture-course derived textbooks and re-worked proceedings of workshops.

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The volume editor and co-workers invented a novel nanometer-scale electronic switch at the beginning of the 2000s and named it atomic switch. This switch is critically different from the conventional semiconductor-based transistor switch in that on/off switching is caused by electrochemically controlled movement of metal atoms (ions) in a nanometer-scale gap between two electrodes. The atomic switch is therefore a two-terminal nonvolatile switch basically, being compact in structure and small in power consumption.

The invention of the atomic switch was made in RIKEN (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Japan) and NIMS (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan). Soon later, we started collaborative research and development of the atomic switch with NEC Corp., and after more than a decade, in 2016, the atomic switch was put into practical use in the form of FPGA (field-programmable gate array). As compared to conventional semiconductor-based FPGA (SRAM-FPGA), NECs new FPGA (AtomSW-FPGA or NanoBridge-FPGA) is characterized not only by nonvolatility, small size (~1/3) and low power consumption (~1/10) but also by high tolerance to electromagnetic noise and radiation including cosmic rays (~100 times). We also revealed that the atomic switch has close similarity to the synapse in human brain and that random networks of such synaptic atomic switches exhibit fascinating novel characteristics.

Recently, we opened an international symposium entitled Atomic Switch; Invention, Practical Use and Future Prospects (Tsukuba, Japan, 2728 March 2017) in commemoration of the practical use of the atomic switch. This book consists of 12 chapters relating to representative papers presented at the symposium and a chapter showing an almost comprehensive list of papers related to the atomic switch published so far. The volume editor is happy and honored to have led the invention and development of the atomic switch over two decades. I hope this book will give new inspirations to scientists and engineers in various fields including ICT, AI and IoT.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Prof. Christian Joachim (CNRS, France) as well as to Ms. Charlotte Hollingworth and Ms. Stephanie Kolb (Springer Nature Publishing) for their patient encouragement in publishing this book. Also, I thank the associate editors of this book, Dr. Kazuya Terabe, Prof. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Dr. Tomonobu Nakayama, Prof. James Gimzewski, Dr. Ilia Valov, Dr. Tsuruoka Tohru and Dr. Takashi Tsuchiya, for their support in editing this book.