Robust Circuit & Architecture Design in the Nanoscale Regime

Abstract

Silicon based integrated circuit (IC) technology is approaching its physical limits. For sub 10nm technology nodes, the carbon nanotube (CNT) based field effect transistor has emerged as a promising device because of its excellent electronic properties. One of the major challenges faced by the CNT technology is the unwanted growth of metallic tubes. At present, there is no known CNT fabrication technology which allows the fabrication of 100% semiconducting CNTs. The presence of metallic tubes creates a short between the drain and source terminals of the transistor and has a detrimental impact on the delay, static power and yield of CNT

Heterogeneous energy‐sparing reconfigurable logic: spin‐based storage and CNFET‐based multiplexing

“…CNTs are essentially a single sheet of graphene rolled into a cylinder, with diameters ranging from 0.6 to 5 nm. Their highest room-temperature mobility and scattering velocity make them suitable candidates for nano-electronics, which based on the chiral vector can be configured as follows [18][19][20][21]:…”

“…The source and drain terminals are doped with impurities at the contacts to improve electron and hole transportation, thus, resulting in a unipolar conduction device. Since an MOSFET-like CNFET possess low subthreshold slope and low OFF current, this makes it an ideal candidate for low-power high-performance circuit design [18]. Throughout this paper, CNFET is referred to as an MOSFET-like CNFET for simplicity.…”

“…CNTs are essentially a single sheet of graphene rolled into a cylinder, with diameters ranging from 0.6 to 5 nm. Their highest room‐temperature mobility and scattering velocity make them suitable candidates for nano‐electronics, which based on the chiral vector can be configured as follows [18–21]: If n = m , then the CNT exhibits metallic properties, or If n − m = 3 i , where i is an integer, CNT acts as a semiconductor with small band gap. Integers n and m are the chirality of the tube. The relative value of m and n impacts the conductive properties of CNTs, i.e.…”