Taming Molecular Field-Coupling for Nanocomputing Design

Abstract

Molecular Field-Coupling Nanocomputing (FCN) is one of the most promising technology for overcoming the CMOS scaling issues. It encodes the information in the charge distribution of nanometric molecules and propagates it through local electrostatic intermolecular interaction. This technology promises very high speed at ambient temperature with minimal power dissipation. The main research focus on Molecular FCN is either on the single-molecule low-level analysis or circuits design based on naive assumptions. We aim to fill this gap, assessing the potential and feasibility of FCN. We present a bottom-up analysis&design framework that starts from the physical characterization of molecular and technological parameters and enables physical-aware FCN designs. The framework explicitly considers molecular physics, allowing the designer to tame the molecular interaction to ensure the computational capabilities of the final device. The framework permits studying possible physical effects that create cross-implications and correlations among physical and system-level layers considering possible behaviour variability. We characterize and verify the molecular propagation in increasingly structured layouts to design complex arithmetic circuits. The results highlight molecular FCN advantages, especially in area occupation, and provide valuable quantitative feedback to designers and technologists to support the assessment of molecular FCN and the realization of an eventual prototype.