Design Tools for Emerging Technologies

Abstract

The rapidly expanding diversity of technology available at the nanoscale is disrupting the existing transistorcentric microelectronics design paradigm, resulting in nearly decade-long delays between prototype demonstration and technology deployment. The key to reducing these innovationinhibiting delays is to develop algorithmic approaches that can start with first principles based descriptions of novel nanotechnology and rapidly and reliably synthesize manufacturable designs. Design tools are evolving this direction, with new extremely efficient yet customizable physical simulators, automatic paramterized low-order model extraction, and ever improving algorithms for robust optimization-new techniques that generate manufacturable designs by optimizing both system performance and robustness to manufacturing variations. In this paper we give a few examples of the coupling of such approaches, but mostly offer pointers to literature for researchers interested in contributed to this rapidly growing field of coupled simulation and robust optimization.