Latency and power consumption in unstructured nanoscale boolean networks

The self-assembly of nanoelectronic devices may result in network of heterogeneous components with an unstructured interconnect. It has been shown that the fan-in of two per gate optimizes the number of required gates in logical blocks for feed-forward networks of gates. On the other hand, the local connectivity in a mesh network optimizes the interconnects energy consumption. In this paper, we address the question of what fan-in optimizes both the power consumption and the latency in an unstructured network. We show that an average fan-in of K = 3.3 is optimal for random Boolean networks when energy and latency are considered equally important. Our results are important as they show an inverse relationship between the energy consumption and the performance, and this allow us to determine the optimal connectivity of a certain class of self-assembled nanoscale devices.