Technical rationale
Hardware goal
- The Intelligent Motion Surface (IMS) requires a large array of “moxels”, each of which can be individually programmed to provide force in any direction.
- Since range of actuator travel is limited, moxels apply quasi-continuous forces through a “gait” produced by multiple actuators, in which each actuator generates both out-of-plane and tangential motions.
Why use CMOS through MOSIS?
- Programmability of moxel requires local gait generator to latch desired vector and reduce number of wires.
- Large number of closely-spaced moxels precludes flip-chip gait generators.
- Therefore, we attempted to produce suitable actuators in CMOS.