Engineering Commons^™

Latching On The Wire And Pipelining In Nanoscale Designs, C. Andras Moritz, Teng Wang

C. Andras Moritz

In contrast to general-purpose programmable fabrics, such as PLAs, we develop nano-fabrics that, while also programmable and hierarchical, are more tuned towards an application domain. Our goal is to achieve denser designs with better fabric utilization and efficient cascading of circuits. We call these designs NASICs: Nanoscale Application-Specific Integrated Circuits. We believe NASICs are a more natural fit to implement microprocessors, out of semiconductor nanowires and crossed carbon nanotubes, than PLA style designs. A key challenge in nanoscale designs in general is to preserve the density advantages of the fabric once topological, interconnect, and faulttolerance constraints are considered. In this …