Design Automation for Nanotechnology

At the nano scale, several classes of post-CMOS integrated circuit technologies are emerging that include contestants with enhancements in terms of energy dissipation and feature size. Recent breakthroughs in the fabrication of these technologies indicate the possibility to realize molecular-sized elementary devices with ultra-low energy dissipation or with clock frequencies in the terahertz range. Furthermore, certain quantum-dot implementations are considered to become bridging technologies to enable interoperability between conventional CMOS circuitry and quantum computers.

Despite these promising characteristics, sophisticated automatic methods that compose nanotech circuits from specifications are scarce. Due to the peculiarity and specificity of the these technologies’ design constraints, conventional physical design algorithms cannot be applied. In other words, design automation for an entire class of highly promising nanotechnologies that could potentially enable a future of powerful and green computational devices is still in its infancy.