Nonreciprocal Radio Frequency Transduction in a Parametric Mechanical Artificial Lattice

Generating nonreciprocal radio frequency transduction plays important roles in a wide range of research and applications, and an aspiration is to integrate this functionality into microcircuits without introducing a magnetic field, which, however, remains challenging. By designing a 1D artificial lattice structure with a neighbor interaction engineered parametrically, we predicted a nonreciprocity transduction with a large unidirectionality. We then experimentally demonstrated the phenomenon on a nanoelectromechanical chip fabricated by conventional complementary metal-silicon processing. A unidirectionality with isolation as high as 24 dB is achieved, and several different transduction schemes are realized by programing the control voltage topology. Apart from being used as a radio frequency isolator, the system provides a way to build a practical on-chip programmable device for broad research and applications in the radio frequency domain.