Alternate State Variables for Emerging Nanoelectronic Devices

We provide an outlook of some important state variables for emerging nanoelectronic devices. State variables are physical representations of information used to perform information processing via memory and logic functionality. Advances in material science, emerging nanodevices, nanostructures, and architectures have provided hope that alternative state variables based on new mechanisms, nanomaterials, and nanodevices may indeed be plausible. We review and analyze the computational advantages that alternate state variables may possibly attain with respect to maximizing computational performance via minimum energy dissipation, maximum operating switching speed, and maximum device density.