Design Tools for an Emerging SoC Technology: Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata

The future of system-on-chip (SoC) technologies, based on the scaling of current FET-based integrated circuitry, is being predicted to reach fabrication limits by the year 2015. Economic limits may be reached before that time. Continued scaling of electronic devices to molecular scales will undoubtedly require a paradigm shift from the FET-based switch to an alternative mechanism of information representation and processing. This paradigm shift will also have to encompass the tools and design culture that have made the current SoC technology possible-the ability to design monolithic integrated circuits with many hundreds of millions of transistors. In this paper, we examine the initial development of a tool to automate the design of one of the promising emerging nanoelectronic technologies, quantum-dot cellular automata, which has been proposed as a computing paradigm based on single electron effects within quantum dots and molecules.