Ignore Clocking Constraints: An Alternative Physical Design Methodology for Field-Coupled Nanotechnologies

Abstract

Field-Coupled Nanocomputing (FCN) allows for conducting computations with a power consumption that is magnitudes below current CMOS technologies. Recent physical implementations confirmed these prospects and put pressure on the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) community to develop physical design methods comparable to those available for conventional circuits. While the major design task boils down to a place and route problem, certain characteristics of FCN circuits introduce further challenges in terms of dedicated clock arrangements which lead to rather cumbersome clocking constraints. Thus far, those constraints have been addressed in a rather unsatisfactory fashion only. In this work, we propose a physical design methodology which tackles this problem by simply ignoring the clocking constraints and using adjusted conventional place and route algorithms. In order to deal with the resulting ramifications, a dedicated synchronization element is introduced. Results extracted from a physics simulator confirm the feasibility of the approach. A proof of concept implementation illustrates that ignoring clocking constraints indeed allows for a promising alternative direction for FCN design that overcomes the obstacles preventing the development of efficient solutions thus far.