Integrated Circuit Design Using Emerging Nano-Scale Devices beyond CMOS Technologies

Abstract

Further scaling of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology is
becoming limited by the product of power density, leakage currents, variability of the
process, and reliability loss driving the investigation of new nano-scale devices as pos
sible enablers of post-CMOS integrated circuit (IC) design. Although numerous concepts
of devices beyond CMOS have been shown to have advantageous device-level prop
erties (such as carbon-based schemes, steep-slope field-effect schemes, memristive
schemes, and spintronic schemes) developing circuits that include them has eluded
even the most ambitious of design approaches and architectures. In this review, we
will develop an analysis that has a strong design focus on the emerging nano-scale
devices capable of designing beyond CMOS ICs to fill the interface between device
and system-level designs. We initially categorize well known beyond CMOS devices in
terms of mode of operation, technology maturity and compatibility with the existing
CMOS. The review then looks at design methods and architecture paradigms made
possible by such devices, opportunities of energy-efficient logic, in-memory computing,
and non-volatile system integrate are possible. Normalized benchmarking measures
are used to talk about the quantitative comparisons of power, performance, and area
and reliability features with the key focus on trade-offs and scalability issues. Also, fun
damental weaknesses of existing design automation and computer aided design (CAD)
systems in beyond-CMOS technologies are discussed. Lastly, the review proposes open
research issues and future prospects of trusted, scaled, and production beyond-CMOS
integrated circuitry. It is hoped that the work will be of significant value to researchers
and practitioners in the field of creating next-generation VLSI systems that are beyond
the traditional CMOS technology by offering a single device-to-architecture view.