Microsystems for Bioelectronics

much the same way that the Turing machine and the Carnot engine suppor t such limit studies for

information processin g and heat engines respectively.

Since the living cell, which is an organic autonomous system, provides an existence proof that

functional and autonomous systems are possible at the scale of a few microns, the size of the nano-

morphic cell is postulated to be of ~10

m

m, a typical size of the living cell (see Table 1.1). In fact, the

living cell is a marvelous machine, which, in order to achieve the goal of staying alive, not only

acquires, processes, and uses information, but also does it at incredibly low rates of energy

consumption in the range of femptowatt to nanowatt. Such levels of power would be a dream target for

electronic microsystems.

There is a parallel in thinking about micron-scale integrated systems to that which occurred when

integrated circuits technology redefined manufacturing of electronic systems. It is hoped that future

research will lead to a similar conceptual leap for the fabrication of systems like the nanomorphic cell.

The studies that follow in this book on limits for the required technologies indicate that a functional

micron-scaled system might be feasible. This suggests possible new research directions in extremely

scaled micro systems and semiconductor bioelectronics, including, for example, integrated micro-scale

energy sources, intelligent microsensor arrays, and very low-energy communication and computation.

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12 CHAPTER 1 The nanomorphic cell