Nanoscale-computing fabrics based on novel materials such as semiconductor nanowires, carbon nanotubes, graphene, etc. have been proposed in recent years. These fabrics employ unconventional manufacturing techniques like Nano-imprint lithography or Super-lattice Nanowire Pattern Transfer to produce ultra-dense nano-structures. However, one key challenge that has received limited attention is the interfacing of unconventional/self-assembly based approaches with conventional CMOS manufacturing to build integrated systems.
We propose a novel nanofabric approach that mixes unconventional nanomanufacturing with CMOS manufacturing flow and design rules to build a reliable nanowire-CMOS 3-D integrated fabric called N3ASICs with no new manufacturing constraints. In N3ASICs active devices are formed on a dense semiconductor nanowire array and standard area distributed pins/vias, metal interconnects route signals in 3D.
The proposed N3ASICs fabric is fully described and thoroughly evaluated at all design levels. Novel nanowire based devices are envisioned and characterized based on 3D physics modeling. Overall N3ASICs fabric design, associated circuits, interconnection approach, and a layer-by-layer assembly sequence for the fabric are introduced. System level metrics such as power, performance, and density for a nanoprocessor design built using N3ASICs were evaluated and compared against a functionally equivalent CMOS design. We show that the N3ASICs version of the processor is 3X denser and 5X more power efficient for a comparable performance than the 16-nm scaled CMOS version without any new/unknown-manufacturing requirement.
Systematic yield implications due to mask overlay misalignment have been evaluated. A partitioning approach to build complex circuits has been studied.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:theses-1848 |
| Date | 01 January 2012 |
| Creators | Panchapakeshan, Pavan |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 |
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