Using Self-Reconfiguration to Increase Manufacturing Yield of CNTFET-based Architectures

Among the key issues facing the semiconductor industry as increasingly unreliable emerging and nanoscale technologies come to the fore are design reliability and manufacturing yield. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant architecture based on Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect-Transistors (CNTFET). The architecture is composed of statically interconnected reconfigurable cells. Static interconnects offer possibilities for scalable and low power circuits while cell reconfiguration is extensively used to increase the architecture fault-tolerance. We show that in the proposed architecture, for a 96% carbon nanotube manufacturing yield, up to 83% of the hardware resources can still be used.