A comparative study of nanowire crossbar and MOSFET logic implementations

Nanowire crossbar is an efficient nanoscale architecture which can be used for logic circuit design. In this work, we study the application of nanowire crossbar in logic circuit implementation. To evaluate the performance of crossbar architecture compared to the conventional MOSFET logic design, we have implemented logic circuits using both approaches. The equivalent circuit models of the crossbar-based circuits are then extracted and simulated using HSPICE. The MOSFET circuits are also simulated using 45-nm technology parameters. Our simulation results show that crossbar-based circuits have much smaller area while MOSFET circuits show better performance in terms of delay. The results also indicate that the crossbar cells can be combined with MOSFET cells to achieve tradeoff between circuit area and speed.