Imperfection-immune VLSI logic circuits using Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistors

Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors (CNFETs) show big promise as extensions to silicon-CMOS because: 1) Ideal CNFETs can provide significant energy and performance benefits over silicon-CMOS, and 2) CNFET processing is compatible with existing silicon-CMOS processing. However, future gigascale systems cannot rely solely on existing chemical synthesis for guaranteed ideal devices. VLSI-scale logic circuits using CNFETs must overcome major challenges posed by: 1) Misaligned and mispositioned Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs); 2) Metallic CNTs; and, 3) CNT density variations. This paper performs detailed analysis of the impact of these challenges on CNFET circuit performance. A combination of design and processing techniques, presented this paper, can enable VLSI-scale CNFET logic circuits that are immune to high rates of inherent imperfections. These techniques are inexpensive compared to traditional defect- and fault-tolerance, do not impose major changes in VLSI design flows, and are compa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Subhasish Mitra, Jie Zhang, Nishant Patil, Hai Wei
• Keywords: Carbon Nanotubes, DATE 2009, Hardware, Logic Circuits, Nanotube Field-effect Transistors