It can be specifically useful in the robotics and manufacturing industries.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, use ultrasound waves to move objects hands-free, according to an institutional press release.

It has been shown in previous studies that objects can be manipulated with light and sound waves, too. But the objects in question were always far smaller than the wavelengths of either light or sound or on the order of millimeters to nanometers.

The deluge of sensors and data generating devices has driven a paradigm shift in modern computing from arithmetic-logic centric to data-centric processing. Data-centric processing require innovations at the device level to enable novel compute-in-memory (CIM) operations. A key challenge in the construction of CIM architectures is the conflicting trade-off between the performance and their flexibility for various essential data operations. Here, we present a transistor-free CIM architecture that permits storage, search, and neural network operations on sub-50 nm thick Aluminum Scandium Nitride ferroelectric diodes (FeDs). Our circuit designs and devices can be directly integrated on top of Silicon microprocessors in a scalable process. By leveraging the field-programmability, nonvolatility, and nonlinearity of FeDs, search operations are demonstrated with a cell footprint 0.12 μm2 when p.