One-pass Synthesis for Field-coupled Nanocomputing Technologies

This work was a Best Paper Award candidate at ASP-DAC 2021.

Field-coupled Nanocomputing (FCN) is a class of post-CMOS emerging technologies, which promises to overcome certain physical limitations of conventional solutions such as CMOS by allowing for high computational throughput with low power dissipation. Despite their promises, the design of corresponding FCN circuits is still in its infancy. In fact, state-of-the-art solutions still heavily rely on conventional synthesis approaches that do not take the tight physical constraints of FCN circuits (particularly with respect to routability and clocking) into account. Instead, physical design is conducted in a second step in which a classical logic network is mapped onto an FCN layout. Using this two-stage approach with a classical and FCN-oblivious logic network as an intermediate result, frequently leads to substantial quality loss or completely impractical results. In this work, we propose a one-pass synthesis scheme for FCN circuits, which conducts both steps, synthesis and physical design, in a single run. For the first time, this allows to generate exact, i.e., minimal FCN circuits for a given functionality.

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