Automated Design of Misaligned-Carbon-Nanotube-Immune Circuits

Carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFETs) are promising candidates as extensions to silicon CMOS due to excellent CV/I device performance. An ideal CNFET inverter fabricated using a perfect CNFET technology can have 5.1 times faster FO4 delay and 2.6 times lower energy per cycle compared to a 32 nm silicon CMOS inverter. Two fundamental challenges prevent us from creating CNFET-based logic designs with the advantages quoted above: 1. misaligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and 2. Metallic CNTs. Misaligned CNTs can result in incorrect logic function implementations. This paper presents a technique for designing CNFET-based arbitrary logic functions that are guaranteed to be correct even in the presence of a large number of misaligned CNTs.