The WEAF Mnecosystem (water, earth, air, fire micro/nano ecosystem): a perspective of micro/nanotechnologies as pillars of future 6G and tactile internet (with focus on MEMS)

In these days of great attention around the dawn of 5G deployment, the future 6G scenario poses challenges and sketches trends that, according to the opinion of prominent scholar and scientists, fall far beyond the boundaries of the field that 5G will manage to conquer. In a nutshell, the classical approaches in designing devices, systems and infrastructures, which have been seamlessly followed from 1 to 5G, will not be suitable to build the artificial intelligence-driven (AI) 6G network. Self-adapting capabilities, which 6G will push to the edge, urge for a pronounced separation between hardware (HW) and software (SW), this being in full contrast with the consolidated HW-SW co-design philosophy followed up to date. On one side, algorithms will have to be able to estimate the physical resources they can rely on in order to run in an optimal way. On the other hand, the HW will need to gain more symmetry with respect to the SW, in terms of flexibility, functions reconfigurability and self-adaptivity/self-evolution. This work envisions a prime role for micro/nanotechnologies, embodying materials, electronics and micro/nanosystems, in the future scenario of 6G and of the tactile internet. Such a part is expected to be so prominent that a reformulation of the common concept of HW, triggered by micro/nanotechnologies, is suggested in the next pages. To this end, the WEAF Mnecosystem, i.e. the water, earth, air and fire micro/nanotechnologies Ecosystem, is conceived, leveraging the analogy with the four classical elements in nature. In brief, earth and air represent the classical concepts of HW and SW, respectively. Water is the new formulation of HW that, like water, is liquid in terms of functional characteristics. Moreover, it gains some features typical of the SW (i.e. air). Fire, eventually, is the HW devoted to harvest, store and transfer energy, making it available everywhere at the network edge, i.e. when needed, where needed. Concerning the few reference application examples that are going to be listed below, for the purpose of this work they will focus on MEMS technology.