Logic Synthesis for Silicon and Beyond-Silicon Multi-gate Pass-Logic Circuits

International audience ; In the last decade several new technologies have been proposed as possible replacement for MOSFETs; Silicon Nanowires, Magnetic Tunnel Junctions, Graphene p-n Junctions are just some of the most representative examples. Although their intrinsic differences, they all share a common key characteristic, i.e., enable the implementation of logic gates with an expressive power much higher than that of state-of-art silicon CMOS gates. This may translate into more complex and faster switching functions that count less devices. The view of new materials that can serve as technological vehicles for energy efficient circuits and systems attracted the interested of the whole electronics research community. Apart from the many technological aspects, the path towards large-scale integration of emerging devices crosses the need of (i) new integration strategies that better fit the characteristics of the new technologies and (ii) new computer-aided design (CAD) methodologies able to cope with the complexity of today’s design specs. The availability of this two elements may open the way for fast design space exploration and better assessment of new technologies against standard CMOS.This work focuses on logic synthesis and optimization tools for ultra-low power pass-gate circuits mapped into emerging technologies, Graphene and silicon nano-wires. More specifically, we describe a novel multi-function decomposition engine that (i) efficiently performs abstract circuit modeling through a highly-compact data structure called Multi-Function Pass Diagram (MFPD), (ii) provides an effective multi-gate synthesis & optimization flow, (iii) allows accurate power/delay estimations. The contents reported in the following sections represent one of the first examples of how dedicated algorithms and data-structures can substantially improve the quality-of-design when moving from CMOS to emerging technologies.Simulation run conducted on different benchmarks demonstrate that pass-gate circuits synthesized with the ...