  We study the electromechanical transduction in nanoelectromechanical
actuators and show that the differences in scaling for electrical and
mechanical effects lead to an overall non-trivial scaling behavior. In
particular, the previously neglected fringing fields considerably increase
electrical forces and improve the stability of nanoscale actuators. This shows
that electrostatics does not pose any limitations to downscaling of
electromechanical systems, in fact in several respects, nanosystems outperform
their microscale counterparts. As a specific example, we consider in-plane
actuation of ultrathin slabs and show that devices consisting of a few layers
of graphene are feasible, implying that electromechanical resonators operating
beyond 40 GHz are possible with currently available technology.
