Automated design of misaligned-carbon-nanotube-immune circuits

ABSTRACT

Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors (CNFETs) are promising candidates as extensions to Silicon CMOS due to excellent CV/I device performance. An ideal CNFET inverter fabricated using a perfect CNFET technology can have 5.1 times faster F04 delay and 2.6 times lower energy per cycle compared to a 32nm Silicon CMOS inverter. Two fundamental challenges prevent us from creating CNFET-based logic designs with the advantages quoted above: 1. Misaligned Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs), and 2. Metallic CNTs. Misaligned CNTs can result in incorrect logic function implementations. This paper presents a technique for designing CNFET-based arbitrary logic functions that are guaranteed to be correct even in the presence of a large number of misaligned CNTs.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Reliability

Keywords:
CNFET, CNT, carbon nanotube transistor, circuits, fault tolerance, misaligned carbon nanotubes immune