Temperature Behavior of Silicon Dangling Bond Logic

Silicon Dangling Bonds (SiDBs) on the hydrogen-passivated silicon surface have emerged as a promising competitor in the realm of beyond-CMOS computational technologies. They have attracted the attention of academia and industry due to their greatly increased integration density and energy efficiency compared to contemporary fabrication nodes. Since information propagation and computation in the SiDB domain are based on electrostatic field coupling, SiDBs are considered as a room temperature-enabled technology. However, the effect of temperature on SiDB-based gates and their operation has not yet been considered. Consequently, established design automation flows and gate library proposals are temperature-agnostic without any guarantee of their operability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we investigate for the first time the effect of temperature on the operation of SiDB-based gates. To this end, we utilize a newly developed temperature-aware simulator and exhaustively evaluate previously fabricated gates and theoretically proposed standard libraries. The results reveal significant temperature-sensitivity of many gates, highlighting the crucial role of considering temperature behavior in the realization of SiDB-based gates. Therefore, it is imperative to minimize the use of such temperature-sensitive components in future designs and to develop more robust standard gates. This research serves as the foundation for subsequent studies and is vital for the acceleration of the development of this promising green nanotechnology.

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