Reducing the Complexity of Operational Domain Computation in Silicon Dangling Bond Logic

Published in International Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures, 2023

Silicon Dangling Bonds (SiDBs) constitute a beyond-CMOS computational nanotechnology platform that enables higher integration density and lower power consumption than contemporary CMOS nodes. Recent manufacturing breakthroughs in the domain sparked the interest of academia and industry alike in the race for a green computation future at the nanoscale. However, as the fabrication of SiDBs requires atomic precision, SiDB logic systems are inherently susceptible to environmental defects and material variations, which inevitably occur. The Operational Domain is a methodology to evaluate the resilience of SiDB logic against physical parameter variations. However, state-of-the-art implementations require a quadratic number of exponentially complex physical simulator calls to assess the operational domain. This paper presents two novel algorithms to obtain operational domains in an efficient fashion: one based on flood fill, and one based on contour tracing. Experimental evaluations confirm that they reduce the number of required simulator calls by 70.87 % and 95.29 %, respectively. Particularly contour tracing achieves the shift from a quadratic to a linear relation, thereby reducing the complexity and paving the way for realizing reliable SiDB-based computing systems.

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