A Mechanical Transduction-Based Molecular Communication Receiver for Internet of Nano Things (IoNT)

Molecular communication (MC) is one of the most promising technology to enable nanonetworks. Despite many aspects of MC have been investigated broadly, the physical design of the MC receiver has gained little interest. High-performance MC receivers based on bioFETs are proposed and extensively analyzed. However, they have some challenges such as limited detection with charged molecules, Debye screening, and the need for reference electrodes. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a mechanical-based transducing scheme. In particular, we focus on a Flexure field-effect transistor (FET)-based MC receiver architecture, which provides exponentially high sensitivity by utilizing a nonlinear electromechanical coupling. In addition, the detection of neutral molecules with much simpler instrumentation is possible. In this paper, we analyze its fundamental performance metrics; sensitivity, noise power, signal-to-noise ratio, and the symbol error probability, from an MC theoretical perspective.